One Of The Good Guys by Araminta Hall

 

One of the Good Guys by Araminta Hall.

Published 4th January 2024 by Pan Macmillan.

From the cover of the book:

If most men say they’re one of the good guys, then why are so many women afraid to walk alone at night?

Cole is the perfect husband: a romantic, supportive of his wife, Mel’s career, keen to be a hands-on dad, not a big drinker. A good guy.

So when Mel leaves him, he's floored. She was lucky to be with a man like him.

Craving solitude, he accepts a job on the coast and quickly settles into his new life where he meets reclusive artist Lennie.

Lennie has made the same move for similar reasons. She is living in a crumbling cottage on the edge of a nearby cliff. It’s an undeniably scary location, but sometimes you have to face your fears to get past them.

As their relationship develops, two young women go missing while on a walk protesting gendered violence, right by where Cole and Lennie live. Finding themselves at the heart of a police investigation and media frenzy, it soon becomes clear that they don’t know each other very well at all.

This is what happens when women have had enough . . .

***********

Cole considers himself one of the 'good guys', so he is mystified when his wife, Mel, decides to leave him in the middle of IVF treatment for a much wanted child. Trying to piece his life together, and work through the hostility he firmly believes Mel is unfairly sending his way, he moves to a remote cottage on the coast and begins the kind of simple life he had hoped he would be living with a cherished wife and child.

Unexpectedly, Cole meets the woman he feels could actually be his soulmate, artist Lennie, who is staying in a similarly isolated cabin on the coastline. However, as their lives start to become entwined, two young women walking the coastal path as part of a campaign against gendered violence go missing, and Cole and Lennie find their relationship under the scrutiny of both the police... and the public. Cole soon realises that Lennie is not the woman he thought she was, but then maybe he is not the man he claims to be either...

One of the Good Guys is a feminist thriller with an intriguing twist or two up its sleeve, as Hall lulls you into the false security of thinking you know exactly where this novel is going... until the magic moment when you realise she has turned the whole set-up on its head and led you down an unexpected (coastal?) path into a morass of issues around the reality of being a woman in a modern world filled with 'good guys'.

Without giving the game away, the story follows three central narratives from Cole; his former wife Mel; and Lennie, the new woman in his life, set against the media frenzy of the case of the missing girls. As the story unfurls in the present, and in a past filled with emotional baggage, relationships between the three become increasingly twisted around, which Hall uses to beautiful effect to highlight a spectrum of of acts against women from the most subtle uses of control, to whopping acts of abuse. The way she uses extracts from on-line chat groups, podcasts and articles to break up the flow of the narratives is particularly clever - and shockingly thought provoking too.

This is a most uncomfortable book to read, not least because the characters in it - both male and female - are so tricky to like, even when you have deep empathy for their situations. However, I am incredibly impressed by the way Hall forces you to confront such a swathe of messy, darker shades of grey, especially where they stray into red flag territory, when it comes to modern relationships; the insidious abuse dished out by faceless trolls on social media; and the dangers of the unintentional complicity of women in falsely perpetuating the 'good guy' label. 

I am not sure I can say I actually 'enjoyed' reading this one, but, my goodness, it is a book that makes you think. Provocative, explosive, and anger inducing, this really is the 'water-cooler' book of the moment, and the perfect read for the post-#MeToo landscape.

One of the Good Guys is available to buy now in hardcover, ebook and audio formats.

Thank you to Pan Macmillan for sending me a copy of this book in return for an honest review. 

About the author:

Araminta Hall is a journalist and teacher. She is the author of five previous novels, including her first novel, Everything and Nothing, which was published in 2011 and became a Richard and Judy read that year. She is the great niece of Dodie Smith and the great granddaughter of Lawrence Beesley, who survived the Titanic and wrote a bestselling account of the tragedy in the book, The Loss of the SS Titanic.

She teaches creative writing at New Writing South Brighton, where she lives with her husband and three children.