Blair's Reviews > The Only Child

One of the silliest books I’ve ever read. The Only Child starts off as enjoyable schlock about a psychiatrist whose latest ‘client’ claims to be a 200-year-old superhuman who inspired the characters of Frankenstein’s monster, Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde and Dracula. He also says he’s her father, despite the fact that they appear to be the same age. After the man kills one of Lily’s colleagues and threatens to frame her, she’s led on a chase across Europe in search of the truth about his history.

Though published in 2017, it feels very much like a mid-2000s adventure novel, what Elizabeth Knox in The Absolute Book calls an ‘arcane thriller’ – like the Da Vinci Code knock-offs that were everywhere at one point, or a less cerebral version of The Historian, which I loved in 2007. Various locations are detailed in risibly clichéd and/or improbable terms (at one point Michael bribes the doorman at a London hotel with a ‘hundred-pound note’). Lily is a predictably beautiful idiot who lusts after every man she meets – including the one who may or may not be her dad – for no reason other than to crowbar sex into the narrative. Things happen so fast that there’s little time to dwell on various revelations or how the characters handle them.

Brainless entertainment can be fun, obviously. And I was having a good enough time at first, which is why I didn’t give up on this despite how ridiculous it all is. But the story loses a lot of steam as it goes along. By the time Lily and Michael were kidnapped by a rogue ex-CIA mercenary (!), I was dying for it all to end. It was an effort to drag myself to the finish line.