Reviewed by Emma Crowley
Someone is watching her. She just doesn’t know it yet.
Nell Sweeney has led an ordinary life. Every day she walks to and from the hospital where she works as a nurse, believing that no harm can befall her.
Until one day she is taken.
Because someone out there has a secret. Someone out there has been watching Nell – and they’ve been watching others like her too.
Nell is the unlucky one – she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And if she isn’t found soon, someone will make sure that she isn’t the last woman to disappear…
Many thanks to Avon Books UK via NetGalley for my copy of The Nurse to review and to Sharon for having my review on the blog.
The Nurse is the first book that I have read by Clare Allan writing in the crime/thriller genre. It’s a tense, quick and uneasy read whose subject matter really gets under your skin as it gives you a glimpse into a world you would perhaps rather not know about. Clearly there has been plenty of research undertaken into the creepy, seedy and dangerous world of incels, a topic which I knew nothing about prior to reading this book. Yes, I am aware of the darker side of the internet that exists but the extent of this disturbing side of the net I had no clue about. I feel I have been informed of a topic that unfortunately will only rear its head more and more in the future. The author’s end notes detail some of the disturbing facts she found out whilst doing research for this book and one item in particular had me reeling in horror. The dominant male characters that feature are very unhinged and the women who fall prey to them are vulnerable people who didn’t deserve to go through what happened to them and it’s all because these men are obsessed with an ideology and a power struggle that in reality is in fact growing at a terrifying rate.
The story is told from several perspectives which are easy enough to follow. Initially, the reader is not privy to who said male characters are. They like to keep their anonymity but when their true personalities are revealed you are left in shock as to their backgrounds. I did feel the reveal as to who the culprit was came too early on in the book, I wanted more suspense and for it to be drawn out a little bit. I wanted to guess as to who they were but I found the reveal came too early. As we knew at a certain point who was behind the kidnapping of Nell, who was a nurse in a hospital in Derry, the attention shifted as to whether Nell would survive her ordeal or not? The pace increased at this point and I felt this happened at the right time as things for the first quarter or so were quite slow. The race to see if Nell could be found before the worst occurred kept me interested and turning the pages and we gain an even deeper insight into the horrifying world of incels. The last few chapters were edge of your seat stuff and I could only see things going one way given how the author was developing the plot. To say there was a dramatic and shocking conclusion would be an understatement and I found it very satisfying.
Despite a slow start I did think we got straight to the crux of the story fairly early on. I say it was slow, despite hitting the subject matter hard, because there were chapters where Nell’s mother Marian just seemed to ramble on and in a way descend into some sort of madness herself. Of course any parent will be going out of their mind with worry and grief when their daughter has failed to show up for work and is now declared as being missing for several days. But Marian was a character where I speed read through her chapters, she was going mad not knowing where Nell was but her focus seemed to turn on her husband Stephan. She was using this opportunity to expose all the faults in their marriage of which there were many, when I felt all her efforts should have been on locating Nell.
Marian painted Nell as a young woman who had it all and was a good girl. But we see that Nell kept things hidden from her parents and her housemate and friend Clodagh. Which goes to show we never know what is going on behind closed doors. To be honest, I found Marian to be an annoying and frustrating character and at one point she asks Stephan does Stephan feel guilty like she does for letting Nell move out and not keeping her at home to look after her. Given the opportunity, I would have loved to say to Marian, god people need to leave home and find their own personal space and place. She can’t protect her daughter forever and nor would Nell want protecting all the time.
Nell has found herself imprisoned and the scenes as to where she was kept and the rules she had to obey were chilling, disturbing and horrifying. It’s only a good few chapters into the book that we hear from her perspective and we see that things are not as clear cut as initially you would have thought. That perhaps she was caught in something where she took someone as being genuine and perhaps a friend clearly having no idea of the trap she had fallen into nor the agenda behind her kidnapping. A greater force was at work of which she was a mere pawn. With every turn of the page you fear that her time is up. One small error and it would be game over for her.
The most gripping parts of the story were from the male perspectives. Chapters told from someone only known as him leave you open mouth in horror as to the opinions and viewpoints held by this man and the subsequent forum he finds on the dark web. Yes, this is a work of fiction but the dark web is not. This character feels a growing anger at the way men are treated in this unfair world. Yet he likes to be in control, to overpower, intimidate and hurt. He gets a huge hit of endorphins from scaring women and sets up a #IHavethePower where he videos himself following women and intimidating them. Soon he has a loyal band of followers and the videos go viral and an even greater movement is born. These men feel that women are not looking for equality with them rather that women feel they are better and what to prove it. The men feel women use their status as the weaker sex in order to get away with things. This is only the tip of the iceberg as to the view this man and these forum members hold and I found it hard to believe what I was reading. They are off their heads and all the more dangerous for it. Feminism is viewed as a bad word and the toxic masculinity oozes from them. Then the word, incels, was introduced and I had never heard of it but it went along way in explaining what I was reading. Incels believe women are expendable. That society has moved too far of women and that men are being denied their human rights and being discriminated and rejected by women. Really, all the men were doing was proving that a woman’s worst fears were actually accurate.
There is plenty of food for thought here and the topic offers itself to great debate. The reader is taken down a dark and twisting road and I couldn’t stop thinking about the recent murder of a young girl here in Ireland whilst reading this. In fact, the subject matter only made me fear for my safety even more. If this is just a small snapshot of what is going out there I dread to think the true extent of it. For me this book became truly gripping in the later half, I just wanted more of an element of surprise rather than some things occurring too early on. But no doubt about it Clare Allan has written a dark and atmospheric read about a topic which is relevant and current and will only become even more so in the future. It’s well worth giving this book a go even just to open your eyes even further as a woman to the dangers that are out there and to then therefore be more wary in your daily life.
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