Some of my problems with this book:

• Every single character is obsessed with babies, cooking and fad diets, and is massively middle-class. I’ve never seen coriander mentioned so many times in the first 100 pages of a novel.
• For a book about the ramifications of our actions, everyone’s life decisions seem to have very few consequences. The characters neglect their businesses, abandon their work, commit adultery or move to Europe at the drop of a hat, all without even making an effort. This makes the matters designated as actual “problems” rather hard to take seriously.
• Every single woman is the same: super-humanly capable, skinny and with no inner life. Except Felicity, who has the characteristic “I used to be fat”. They all have shiny hair, wear jeans and boots at all times and are massively competitive with each other because that’s how women are. Obviously.
• The male characters might as well have not bothered turning up. Two husbands, a lover and a son are merely placeholders for the plot. They’re the driving force behind every action each of the women takes, but seem to be weirdly detached from events, emotions and decision-making. The author is so disinterested in them that she can hardly bother to keep their back-stories straight. How many brothers does John Paul have. Six? Or is it five now? As long as they and their wives remain merely an imaginary judgement chorus in Cecelia’s mind, then who cares?
• There’s some pretty extensive and aggressive body fascism throughout the book, for no particular reason. Moriarty (the author, not the Sherlock villain) repeatedly contrasts being fat with being attractive as though the two are mutually exclusive. Felicity’s weight is portrayed as a horrendous deformity. She is never mentioned , either as a child or an adult, without a reference to her size or eating habits. Sentences such as “no ordinary man could really love her!” are used casually, ordinary here being the opposite of “a fat freak”. At first I thought this was leading up to some moral message about body issues, but it seems not. It’d just what Moriarty considers to be reasonable attitudes to those with a different body shape to her.
• The main plot, Cecilia and her husband’s letter: First C prevaricates for a third of the novel about whether to open the letter, even though she is obviously going to do so. Consequently by the time she does so the contents are obvious and the whole event anticlimactic. She then spends the remainder of the book doing nothing about the letter’s contents, whilst behaving like an attention-seeking child: moaning and crying, being sick in public, deliberately drinking too much etc. This culminates in her committing the grave sin of forgetting to buy butter for her spoilt family’s hot-cross buns. Then, justice strikes! Or revenge. Or fate. Or random coincidence. Whatever Moriarty intended the ending to be.
• Plot 2: Tess and her husband’s sort-of-affair: Basically pointless. An entire book’s-worth of T dragging her son across the country for his own good and moping like a teenager at her mum’s house before she returns to her husband and forgets the whole thing. Even her affair with an ex-boyfriend serves no purpose, since the brief possibility that he is an exciting murderer is dismissed almost immediately, leading to there being no tension or point whatsoever. Instead we get several chapters of her having unrealistically good sex and listening to the ex’s tragic back-story, which he tells at the drop of the hat in between boasting about the amount of therapy he needs. Then suddenly her husband tips up, he moans about his mid-life crisis, she moans about her social anxiety, and they are back together. She doesn’t even seem to make any actual decision on the matter, just passively acquiesces. The man-stealing cousin meanwhile is despatched to France for no reason, presumably taking all the blame for the situation as she goes. The whole thing, 1/3 of the book, seems to exist only so that there is a reason for the ex to be stood in a field on Good Friday. Surely this could have been achieved more easily?
• Plot 2: Rachel’s dead child. This is explained to us very slowly and piecemeal, in order to fill the requisite number of pages. Not much happens except that Rachel hates her daughter-in-law (because...women. You know) and wishes her daughter hadn’t been killed. Then she finds a new clue with suspiciously convenient timing, although it changes nothing. Then she’s prepared to commit murder to avenge her daughter’s death. Then she’d actually rather just forget the whole thing. That’s it.
• The epilogue: The omniscient narrator, who has been popping up briefly throughout, asserts themselves aggressively here. Having already heard weirdly detailed description of exactly what Janie the dead daughter would have done with her entire life if she had lived, we also find out what would have happened in a number of alternative universes where Janie chose to not miss her doctor’s appointment, or picked a different boyfriend, or had been born thirty years later and therefore had the capability of sending a text to let her mother know her whereabouts. We also hear about how all the characters currently not paired-off will find love in the future, and will be cured of their mental problems. About how Tess never tells her second child or her husband that she can’t be entirely certain that they’re actually related, how the murder was hardly even a murder anyway and we should just let it go, and about how Cecilia’s daughter would have been a tennis prodigy except that she never actually picked up a tennis racquet. It reads like a series of undeveloped plotlines from the author’s notebook that she decided to sketch in at the end anyway, and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with the information.

And then it just stops. Hundreds of pages of people agonising about two issues, one big, dramatic incident, the end. All the smug, self-obsessed bores go back to martyring themselves on their own lack of imagination. The end.