Candice Carty-Williams scored a huge hit with her debut novel ‘Queenie’, which detailed the travails of a young Black woman in London. Her second book, however, is something of a disappointment. It concerns five half-siblings who have the same father (a solipsistic chancer) but four different mothers. The five – save for the pair with the same mother – barely know each other. The novel begins promisingly enough, detailing an excruciating encounter between the father and the five, but then it flashes forward to the present. One of the sisters, now thirty, has a fight, which leads to a tragedy. She then gets in touch with her siblings who all agree to help her cover up a major crime. My ‘That Wouldn’t Happen’ klaxon began blaring loudly at this point, and it didn’t let up until the disappointingly weak resolution. The premise is interesting enough without the daffy plot. RM

Published by Trapeze