Beautiful Malice

by Rebecca James

[Leah]

After the death of her younger sister and the disintegration of her family, Katherine Patterson moves to Sydney and starts again at a new school. When the beautiful and charming Alice befriends Katherine, she's easily sucked into Alice's fabulous world and the two soon become firm friends. However Alice has a dark side, making her unnecessarily cruel and selfish, as Katherine finds out and soon Katherine is wondering if she and Alice are friends at all. When Katherine starts questioning hers and Alice's friendship she discovers yet another side to Alice: a side that doesn't like being put out into the cold.

Like most books I end up buying, I found out about Beautiful Malice on another book site. Someone added it onto their GoodReads page and because I adored the beautiful dark blue cover, I clicked it to see what it was about. Then I saw the quote, and I knew I had to have the book and I pre-ordered it and I absolutely couldn't wait for its release. I knew that as soon as it arrived (with an orange cover, which is still beautiful, but I quite liked the dark blue) I would have to read it immediately so I decided that after I'd finished The Killing Place by Tess Gerritsen, it would be what I read next. I finished Tess's book yesterday and started Beautiful Malice this morning, not expecting to finish it today, but I have because it was that good.

Here's the quote that attracted me to the book (after the cover, of course): "So. Were you glad, deep down? Were you glad to be rid of her? Your perfect sister? Were you secretly glad when she was killed?" You have to admit, that is a pretty intriguing quote, no? It's a strong quote and is probably a quote that will make many people (like me) buy the book because you want to know the answer and see why such a question was asked. I certainly wanted to know the answer and I started the book eagerly, hoping to get stuck in. The book opens with a Prologue before heading into the main plot of the story, Katherine's friendship with Alice. At first, Katherine and Alice's friendship seems perfect; Katherine has just moved to the school after the death of her sister Rachel and Alice comes up to Katherine and the pair make friends and are joined in their little twosome with Robbie, a friend of Alice's and they become a threesome, always hanging out together.

It doesn't take long for Alice's spiteful streak to come out and she quickly went down in my estimation. When Robbie called her narcissistic, he was spot on in his assessment. Alice gets progressively worse culminating in Katherine questioning their friendship, which Alice obviously doesn't take too kindly. But while we're learning all of this about Katherine and Alice's friendship, we also learn about Katherine's life as it is now (five years later) but the most important aspect of the entire story is the flashbacks we get to the night Rachel, Katherine's sister, was killed. It's given to us in snippets and I didn't think we'd get the entire story of that night. In hindsight, I rather wish we hadn't, I must say. Eventually, though, it all tumbles out and it's not light stuff; nothing in the entire book can be described as "light". But what the book is, is that it's engrossing. It's so engrossing. I wasn't too sure at the beginning but I was sucked in quickly. All three separate, but interlinking, stories were interesting because it was, if I'm honest, as if Katherine was three separate people, one for each story, rather than one person throughout the book and that kind of showed how all of the incidents that happened had changed her.

It was hard to really get a handle on any of the characters; as I said, Katherine seemed like three entirely separate people, but I liked her. The journey she goes on is difficult and the guilt and despair she feels over the loss of her sister was rather enlightening and the way she sees herself and her life, you just couldn't help but feel so sorry for her. She was in a lose/lose situation; either spend her life feeling overwhelmed by guilt or attempt to move on and be shot down for doing so. Her friendship with Alice - and Robbie - helps her to try and move on until Alice's narcissistic side begins to take over and she begins to show some of her true colours. Alice was totally unlikeable, even when she was showering Katherine with attention and being her charming self, I just couldn't take to her at all. I did, however, like Robbie, a friend of Alice's. He seemed so sweet and I hated the fact that he was so stuck on Alice despite the fact she didn't seem to reciprocate those feelings. Two more characters come into the story, Phillipa and Mick, and I liked them, too. In fact, most of the characters were well portrayed. Even Alice was well portrayed and I really got a feel for each and every one of the characters.

Beautiful Malice is so well written, which is unusual for a debut novel, and is told entirely from Katherine's point of view. Which works, because we really get a feel for Katherine and we see things from her point of view. Katherine is unfailing throughout the book and the emotions we see from her are wide and varied and how Rebecca James managed to craft her so well is just awe-inspiring. But the stand out character is Alice. How Rebecca gave us Alice, I have no idea. She was narcissistic, selfish, but she was the most vivid character of the entire book and every scene she was in, she stole without fail. I might not have liked her, but I certainly admired her, in a weird and twisted way. What really made Beautiful Malice for me though was the absolutely shocking, jaw-dropping twist that happens. I was literally stunned and, even now, I still can't get over it. I'll debate over it for an absolute age because it was such a shock. I usually see twists in books coming, but this was completely out of left field.

Overall, I found Beautiful Malice a hard book to put down, but at the same time it was a difficult book to read. The death of a sibling is always going to be hard to read; the death of anyone in a novel is hard to read, despite the fact it's fiction, but in Beautiful Malice, under the circumstances, it was harder and it wasn't at all pleasant. The way in which the book is written though makes it hard to put down and, despite how the book plays how and despite the fact it's not a light read at all, I did love it. It's a psychological thriller at its very best and even now, a day later, I still can't get over how it all panned out. I'll continue to turn it around and around for a very long time and there's a good chance I'll have to re-read the book again at some point in the future just to see how it all comes across second time around. It's the mark of a good book when you can't forget it and Beautiful Malice was better than good, it was stunning.