Title: Watch Me Disappear
Author: Ross Armstrong
Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Detective
First published: January 24th 2023
Publisher: MIRA
Finished reading: January 21st 2023
Pages: 336
DNF at 15% (50 pages)

“Some days you meet the person you were always meant to be with. Some days you get shot in the head.”

*** A copy of this book was kindly provided to me by Netgalley and MIRA in exchange for an honest review. Thank you! ***

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There was just something about the blurb of Watch Me Disappear that made it impossible to resist adding it to my shelves… I do always love a story with an amnesia/brain damage/aphasia element, and main character Tom Mondrian sounded like an absolutely fascinating character with him surviving a bullet to the brain and learning to live with his new reality. Add a missing girl case, and I fully expected to have an excellent time with this story… And I sure didn’t expect to have to make the difficult decision to DNF instead.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love the premise of Wath Me Disappear. Having the main character surviving a bullet to the brain and recovering with a new unusual perspective, aphasia, face blindness and no filter sounds absolutely fascinating, and it is an angle that always interests me. Add the fact that Tom works for the police, and there is a lot of potential to be had for the plot… Especially with the hints at the missing girl case and what Tom might add to that investigation. BUT. There were things I simply couldn’t get past, and in the end I just couldn’t force myself to keep reading.

One of the main issues I had was most definitely with the writing style. I know the way this story is written is partly used to show how Tom experiences the world after the brain damage and how he thinks now, but I have to be blunt here and say that there was something about the way Watch Me Disappear was written that made me hate every single minute I had to spend reading it. It’s just too disjointed, haltered and very difficult to follow in general; when I caught myself starting to skimread for the third time in a row this early on in the story, I decided to just throw in the towel instead of continuing my suffering.

I also wasn’t a fan at all of the main character, although I confess that that might have improved later on in the story. But with what I did read, he came over as insipid before the brain damage and mostly self-absorbed after. The fact that I disliked his character and hated having to spend all that time inside his head made my initial interest for his new way of thinking fade away rapidly… I did like the potential of his partner, but he wasn’t enough to redeem the story nor to convince me to continue struggling with the writing and Tom’s character.

As a whole, Watch Me Disappear definitely turned out to be a miss for me despite my interest in the brain damage element. This was mainly due to a major clash with the writing style, which I know can go both ways depending on how you react to it. Who knows, it might work better for you, so don’t give up on my account if the blurb interests you…

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