Oh, what a delightful surprise it was to find out this random audiobook I chose on a whim, at 6 in the morning, is not only written by an Irish author, but is also set in South Dublin.

I have been oblivious to the fact that Spotify offers 15 hours of audiobook listening time per month, as part of its subscription service. I’m an Audible type of gal, with over ten books currently sitting in my library, which, quite frankly, flared up my ADHD decision paralysis. I really wanted to listen to a crime thriller, though, and so Spotify came to my rescue.

As a new mom, Susan O’Donnell spends most of her days at home with her 4-month-old daughter, Bella, while her husband, John, is at work. Their community-driven neighbourhood seems a perfect place to raise their family in, with Susan’s sisters also close by. It is to them she sends a screenshot taken from the neighbourhood messaging group. Who does Celeste think she is, passively-aggressively calling her out like that? She had better pay attention to her own husband, running around with another woman in a bar. And does she know about her teenage daughter hiding away with a boy from school? Susan doesn’t think so.

But shortly after she sends the picture and expresses her frustrations to her sisters, Lisa and Greta, she gets a phone call from one of them asking her to delete it. From the neighbourhood messaging group, she sent it to by accident.

The rumours spread like wildfire, and what follows is a strong feeling of embarrassment and remorse, but also a catastrophic chain of events no one could have predicted.

It starts off with a broken bedroom window in the middle of the night, followed by a death threat. Three bodies are discovered the next morning at two separate locations, and Susan can’t help but feel that one of them should have been her. The murdered woman, while in a different neighbourhood, had the same address – 26 Oakpark, and it makes her wonder if the killer got the wrong house. Was it she who was meant to die? Was it because of a stupid message?

What a multi-layered thriller that is not giving you a space to breathe! And I love it! Chapters are divided into short, digestible chunks, split between Susan’s first-person POV and the third-person POV of others involved. I finished it within 2 days. Simply curious as to what happens next, and what happens after that. It did not drag at all, with each and every page giving you valuable, but more importantly, intriguing information.

The book’s set-up is quite vast, and one of the issues I had was the number of names thrown around at the very beginning. There are a lot of people in this novel, and I had a hard time keeping up with them all, to the point where I was making notes on my phone to try and keep them all straight in my head. They did add heavily to the portrayal of an active community and the story’s background. However, it also meant that I did not connect to any of them in particular, as they weren’t fleshed out to a deeper extent. A lot of them started and remained at that surface level.

And they’re all really awful people, in a variety of ways! As the story progresses, we learn small bits and pieces about each of them, and I wasn’t sure where we’d end up. What a joyous, if very far-fetched, ride.

I must add that the ending wrapped it all up in a simple but satisfying way, thought it was quite clever.

Overall, I highly enjoyed Andrea Mara’s writing style. It piqued my interest quite easily, and I’m looking forward to checking out more of her work. ‘It should have been you’ is also simply just a good book. Unrealistic with the amount of what is happening in a single neighbourhood, especially for the South Dublin area, haha. But that isn’t something that bothers me as a reader, so I didn’t mind.

Have you read any of Andrea Mara’s work? Let me know down in the comments, or if you have any other thriller/crime recommendations, they’re always more than welcome!