Well, count The Heatwave among reasons why I don’t want to have children. Two seemingly normal people come together to make a child that is a psychopath, without any kind of reason or explanation. A child that purposefully torments her mother, kills animals, tries to murder her little sister? No thanks. I’ll remain childless.

The Heatwave is great at the beginning. There’s a sense of dread, an atmosphere of unease that permeates everything. This story even has a bit of a haunted house feel to it, and the reader is unsure whether it is an actual ghost or simply the bad memories that stalk the halls of La Reverie. Coupling that with awful secrets and the blistering descriptions of a hot summer in southern France, Riordan has set up a story that is sure to be intriguing and disturbing.

And then it never really goes anywhere. The narrative becomes monotonous, shifting back and forth between past and present. The stories of Elodie’s dreadful behavior are repetitive, the same situations playing out over and over again with little variation. The sections dealing with the present, with Sylvie and Emma staying at La Reverie, seem less and less important and more like filler as nothing really happens. They swim in the pool, they lounge around the house, they visit the village, repeat ad nauseam.

The characters here are also meaninglessly idiotic. Greg has to be one of the dumbest people on the planet, ignoring the evidence of Elodie’s psychopathy and gaslighting his wife incessantly. I understand a father not wanting to see the worst in his child, but at some point a person with a functioning brain would see the signs. Greg never really does – unrealistically so. Conversely, the last hundred or so pages of the story deal specifically with Sylvie convincing herself that Elodie has changed – after the first half of the book dealt with how manipulative the girl always was.

I hate to say it, but The Heatwave was much more interesting and poignant when Elodie was “dead”. That’s not to say I didn’t see the twist coming a mile away, because it was quite obvious. This book would have been much better if it were simply about Sylvie dealing with the ghosts of Elodie, coming to terms with Emma and the lies between them, grappling with the consequences of Emma’s realizations and the knowledge of who Elodie really was. Elodie being alive drastically undermines all of that, and the last half of the story suffers greatly for it.

I was prepared, based on the first half of The Heatwave, to give it an excellent review. To recommend it as a haunting, foreign experience. Unfortunately, it becomes a predictable and often boring story that even Riordan’s beautiful prose cannot salvage.