Six Stories

Yes, yes, yes. This book was *exactly* what I hoped it would be. Set up as a podcast series, Six Stories combines all the juicy goodness you love about true crime with the snappy pacing of podcasts to create something immensely compelling. Annnd since it's fiction, you don't have to feel weird when you tell people how much fun you're having reading about someone's murder. I listened to the audio version, which I cannot recommend highly enough. It's a full cast which lends itself so well to this type of narrative, and there's a good chance (if you listen to audiobooks regularly) that you'll stumble across a narrator you've heard before. Leighton Pugh, for example, narrates books 2-5 of Ragnar Jonasson's Dark Iceland series. Wesolowski has proven himself a master of the unreliable narrator genre. His ability to reveal just a little bit more at exactly the right time is nearly unmatched in other books I've read that you could say were 'similar.' This book ran a real risk of becoming repetitive - after all, the same events are being recounted in every 'episode,' just from someone else's perspective - but each of his characters had a truly unique voice and each side of the story was vastly different than the others. I really enjoyed the twist near the end, even though I'd pretty much had it figured out (or, at least, had an inkling) by the third or fourth story. It didn't feel contrived at all, AND Wesolowski gave it enough time to flesh out. So often a good twist is ruined by happening too late and rushing the ending, but that was never the case here. The pacing was always perfectly measured, giving all parts of the story their time in the spotlight.