The Refugee

By: Kim Hopkinson

Bernard’s life is turned upside down when his wife Sally and his son Joshua are murdered. Then an elderly lady is murdered. Nearby in a local village, Ahmed, a refugee, is trying to leave his violent life behind as he goes from town to town, running from himself. As the investigation proceeds, it seems there may have been a number of people that wanted to murder Sally. She wasn’t quite who everything thought she was.

I really struggled with this book unfortunately. The first chapter started off really strong and I was really into it, but then it lost me. This book has a bunch of 5 star ratings so this must be a me thing. One of the things that I struggled with the most was the change in the POVs – it randomly switches for different chapters and we don’t always know who we are going to get. Sometimes it’s in first person point of view and sometimes it’s in third person point of view. Sometimes I didn’t know which character I was reading about at first until a few sentences or a paragraph into the chapter.

If you’ve been reading my reviews for a bit, you know that I absolutely love books that have tons of dialogue. Well, this book did NOT have tons of dialogue, which made reading this book feel like a sludge. It is only 171 pages and it felt like a really long 171 pages.

I will say, the ending really did shock me! I didn’t expect the book to end the way that it did at all. It was a really good ending.

This is out now, and it’s out on Kindle Unlimited if you’d like to check this one out!

Publish Date: June 9, 2025
Find the book here.
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