The Flavours of Love

The Flavours of Love by Dorothy Koomson

Age: Adult
Category: Crime; romance
Rating: 4 stars

Helen Thinks: Eighteen months ago, Saffron Mackleroy's husband was stabbed by a killer that is still walking free leaving behind her and their two children. However, just as life starts to get back under control, events happen the causes the control to evaporate. Aunt Betty moves in due to being kicked out of her residential home after getting caught being intimate with a fellow resident on the manager's desk, her fourteen year old daughter has a revelation that will have Saffron second guessing everything she ever thought and as if all that wasn't enough, her husband's killer has started writing to her every day with content that terrifies Saffron.

This was my first adventure into Dorothy Koomson's writing but several of my friends had suggested some of her works and I am glad that I listened to the recommendation. Without giving away too much of the plot because it's one of those stories you just have to read, I applaud Koomson for how full she managed to make this novel. There are twists and turns at every corner, it's full to the brim with amazing characters and she has enough sub-plots that there is no opportunity for the reader to become bored with “The Flavours of Love”. Only one of the plots irritated me at the time and that was Saffron's bulimia. It seemed to come out of nowhere several chapters into the books so I found myself wondering if it was an afterthought but now I have re-read the blurb I can see that Koomson fully intended for Saffron to have that secret so it was probably just me.

The highlight of this novel was the layout of the chapters. It was apparent that the epicentre of the novel was the day that Saffron lost her husband Joel and Saffron had dubbed it as That Day. So each chapter would inform you of how many days, weeks, months, or years before or after That Day did the action happen. For example, the first chapter that uses it is “16 years before That Day”. Koomson cleverly uses the flashback technique to show us Saffron's life with Joel so that he is real to us and we can imagine the pain that Saffron is going through knowing that his killer is still out of there.

“The Flavours of Love” may have been my first Dorothy Koomson novel but it definitely will not be my last.