Janie White, 18, is just about to move to London to start a job in publishing when she is run down while biking home from the beach. “On the day I died, the sea was exceptionally flat,” she recalls. So, clearly not dead then. Twenty years later, an arrest is made in this horrific hit and run and the culprit appears to be pop sensation Robbie Manning. He surrenders without argument because “the past has finally caught up with him.”

Jane Corry’s novel I Died on a Tuesday is an overly long (465 pgs), overly complicated, not-very-well-written thriller. Besides these two narratives (well, Janie can’t speak anymore, but she can sing) we also hear from Vanessa, a widow who works at the local courthouse as a witness service volunteer, who comes into Janie and Robbie’s orbit through the trial.

Things might have been a little more palatable if Corry had focused on just one story, but everyone gets in on the action. For example, Vanessa’s marriage is harbouring a huge secret and her friend, Richard, a local judge (and whom she cleverly refers to as Judge) has a secret, and Janie’s mother went missing around the time she had her accident. But did she though? And Robbie’s rise to fame is suspicious. And all these threads, somehow – and mostly unbelievably – tie themselves into a neat little bow by the time we get to the end of the book. Some people might (and did) say that this book was full of twists. Honestly I just felt like yelling “squirrel” every time I turned the page.

None of these characters were remotely believable to me. None of their motives sufficiently explained their decisions. None of the dialogue felt real to me. It was all tell. I knew by about page 50 that I wasn’t going to like it, but I slogged through hoping that where the writing suffered, there might be a pay off in the plot. I will happily read a book with mediocre prose if the story is a banger.

Nothing to see here.