Holding is set in a sleepy Irish town called Duneen where things are quiet and peaceful until a body is discovered at a building site. Suddenly, secrets that are decades old begin to be uncovered and Sergeant PJ Collins realises he doesn’t really know the people he has been living with.

I wasn’t really sure what to expect with this book, because honestly a celebrity wrote it and you just never know how those kind of books are going to be. But I was really, really pleasantly surprised by this book and how great it was and how solid the writing was. This book really echoes the little parts of Ireland where people are living closely together and everyone knows everything and really showed the ructions one thing can cause and how secrets can suddenly be exposed.

There were no major “get outta here” shock moments in this book because of the way it’s told. The characters all have their own moments, and it’s easy for the reader to identify who is acting weird and who is not and particularly with one character it was very easy to figure out straight away something was up (though I could understand why the guards would have never suspected her). I actually really liked PJ Collins, and he was one of those underestimated characters that proved he wasn’t as stupid as people thought he was. I liked the gentle camaraderie that developed between him and the detective and I feel like they possibly could make a great team! All of the characters in this are solid and well-written and I enjoyed how we found out about them as young people, and older people but how events had really shaped them. At a panel I went to, Graham Norton said he wrote all the young people in the past because that’s how he could write and identify with them as obviously he can’t really identify with youth of today and i really felt that - he wrote characters he could relate to and understand as well as a town that was very similar to the one he grew up in. Maybe it was a bit safe of him but he played it well, and it worked out.

I don’t think the epilogue at the end really worked out for me - I didn’t really care about it too much. I preferred the ending to the very last chapter, and though that would have been a better line to end up on.