Sometimes there is strength in brevity. Think of the Japanese art of Haiku or that clever flower arranging they do with just a couple of stems. Some short books are all the more powerful for what they don't say. Sadly, 'The Death of Murat Idrissi' is very short (it took me about 45 minutes to read) and left me feeling a bit dissatisfied and wanting more than the quickly rotting corpse of a dead young man in the boot of a car.

There's nobody to like in this book. The two girls are silly, naive, and easily led. They take on a foolish project because they've become indebted to a young man who had helped them through their holiday in Morocco.

People smuggling is a timely topic. Sadly - or perhaps not - we really don't get to know anything about poor Murat other than he has died horribly. He goes from being a lost soul to a stinking corpse of inconvenience and a worry to the girls who start to smell of his death. Nobody redeems themself in this book. It's about life wasted but not recognised.

It's competent. It's not badly written, but it fails to engage the reader in any sense of motivation or to give us something to hang our thoughts upon. There are serious topics in here about dislocation, home, ambition, returning to your roots and much much more. But they barely see the light of day. Enormous promise but not a lot to actually get your teeth into.

Thank you to Netgalley for providing an ARC.