Love Will Tear Us Apart: (The Stranger Times 3)

Product Information

The increased cast was dispersed fairly thinly, sometimes operating in isolation and had so little to do with the main action I questioned why they were even given page space.

Vincent Banecroft, the irascible editor of The Stranger Times, has never believed his wife died despite emphatic evidence to the contrary.There is something darker and much older behind the sudden ghostly meetings, something that has it’s eyes on a member of the paper and is willing to do whatever it takes to get their hands on them. And in this third volume there are mentions (although clearly defined) of events and people from the previous two books. Nothing is as it seems and we’re never quite sure who to trust - previously likeable characters are behaving suspiciously, and some who disgusted us at first are becoming strangely sympathetic. The world of Stranger Times got expanded, we have the big bads set up, the sides in a huge magical conflict.

Now, of course the main characters are tangled in the big thing more and more, but somehow it feels like we have small, funny moments that often felt a bit separate from the main thing. It’s actually quite hard to explain what these books about without spoilers, as there’s a lot going on and the world McDonnell has created is being slowly revealed one layer at a time.

There is serious creativity here and if you are looking to escape the chaos of today’s society, then these books might just tick the right boxes for you. The Institute is a strange place, to say the least, run by plastic-faced personnel that are just a half-step short of being robotic, and poor Hannah is subjected to the strangest remedies that go from hot yoga to other… ahem… intrusive therapies that should help her “find herself” but sound too weird even to someone used to the madness of the Stranger Times. I wept real tears as he finally reaches breaking point, having been tortured in the cruellest way imaginable, via his all-consuming love for his wife. As promised in the blurb this book resolves a few story arcs that have been with us since the beginning of the series and adds a few more besides. Also check out The Stranger Times podcast, available almost everywhere, and featuring short stories set in the world of The Stranger Times, written by C.

I originally read The Dublin Trilogy, an Irish based, extremely funny, crime series featuring Bunny McGarry, one of my all time favourite lead protagonists, and have been hooked since.The main focus of the story is that acceleration and culmination of Banecroft’s own personal hell – a storyline that has been building since the beginning of the first book.