Критика романа Марка Эдвардса «Один из семьи»: слабые герои и предсказуемый сюжет

In Mark Edwards’s newest thriller, “One of the Family,” Patrick Tolhurst is a delivery driver and aspiring documentary filmmaker who has spent nine happy months dating the beautiful Holly Grant. Her easy charm makes him forget—most of the time—that she’s the daughter of Charles Grant, a self-made billionaire behind a tech empire. Holly invites him to her family’s annual Hogmanay (New Year’s Eve) gathering at their remote holiday home on Scotland’s Applecross peninsula. Patrick agrees but is nervous. He hopes he can win over her father; brother, Lewis; older sister, Miranda; and brother-in-law, Zack. It’s meant to be a simple introduction, and Holly assures him he’ll be “one of the family” in no time. Mark Edwards Edwards is a British thriller author, who writes novels of domestic suspense—ordinary lives disrupted by extraordinary threats. Edwards pioneered the Kindle self-publishing boom in the early 2010s. He co-wrote bestsellers with Louise Voss before striking out solo with 2013’s “The Magpies.” That thriller shot to number one on Amazon’s charts and led to a deal with Thomas & Mercer. Since then, his books have sold more than five million copies worldwide in 12 languages. He’s built an impressive catalog, which includes “Follow You Home,” “Here to Stay,” and “No Place to Run,” which cracked Amazon’s Kindle top 10. The Setup Once Patrick arrives at the Grants’ cliffside house, more castle than cottage, Edwards wastes little time seeding trouble. A venomous snake turns up in the kitchen. The housekeeper and her sullen teenage daughter clearly share some unspoken history with the family. The local pub landlady all but spits when the Grants come up in conversation; she drops hints about a young hiker who died mysteriously in the nearby hills the previous January, his presence on the peninsula never explained. What Works and What Doesn’t For most of “One of the Family,” the characters seem to lack complexity. They’re not shallow, per se, and they certainly work well enough for the book you think you’re getting through the first 4o chapters or so. And yes, it’s a slow-burn thriller about a rich, dysfunctional family and the outsider caught in their orbit. But it ends up being more than that. Patrick is arguably the weakest character in the book, especially as a hero. Competent, forceful male leads have fallen out of fashion in modern entertainment, treated as inherently suspect, and Edwards seems to have absorbed that lesson a little too well. His hero leans hard into “well-meaning but not too bright,” as Patrick reacts so meekly at two separate crisis points that it’s hard to root for him. In one of these moments, he ignores a thriller trope so familiar that every reader has seen it play out a hundred times on television. Patrick lands himself in even deeper trouble as a result. It’s a choice that borders on farce rather than suspense. Up until the closing chapters, many readers could be forgiven for assuming that the book is headed toward a fairly generic conclusion; it’s enjoyable but unsurprising. There’s plenty of fun along the way, including a memorably spicy scene of Patrick and Holly in an unintentional volume competition with the couple next door, but Edwards gives away little of the curveball to come. For several years now, the ultra-rich have been thriller writer’s villains of choice, and “One of the Family” leans into that trend. One character, rather hypocritically, declares that people like the Grants “care about protecting their wealth and power more than anything else in the world.” For lazy writers, that’s usually as far as characterization goes: Rich equals evil, no motivation required. Edwards seems content to walk that worn path before swerving into a genuinely unexpected twist in the final stretch. Had the Patrick character been written with more depth and a firmer moral spine, that twist might have carried through to a more honest climax. Instead, Edwards wants it three competing ways: He taps into the reflexive “rich people are evil” sentiment, suggests money corrupts anyone who gets close to it (including the very poor), and still steers the good guys toward a financial payoff that lets the reader feel good about how it all ends. It’s a difficult jump to make, and Edwards doesn’t quite land it. “One of the Family” is a well-written, fast-paced, thoroughly enjoyable thriller that closes on an ambitious yet awkward note.