She performs this trick several times in the novel I fell for it every time. Just as one begins to think Yu-Jin’s obliviousness has gone on quite long enough, Jeong opens a door into a different closet of her protagonist’s mind. It takes live-at-home law student Yu-jin several dozen pages to realise what the reader knows almost immediately: that he is the one who has done his mother in. The first of Jeong’s techniques to become apparent is that of leading the reader down the garden path. The first murder, suffice it to say, is only the first door of many in a novel full of psychological twists and turns, false starts and culs-de-sac. The novel is cleverly plotted and constructed, but it is, alas, impossible to discuss the story-line without giving something away. So starts The Good Son, a psychological thriller from Korean writer Jeong You-jeong, whose books have reportedly sold than one million copies in Korea although already in available in French and German (including having a previous novel named one of the top ten crime novels of 2015 by the German newspaper Die Zeit), to say nothing of Chinese and Japanese, this is her first work available in English. It turns out he’s caked in it and there are bloody footprints all over the floor. Yu-jin wakes up after a late night out smelling blood.
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