The descriptions of the monster in this book are so brilliantly vivid they make your skin crawl.
In The Badness of Ballydog, the setting was a town full of bad, sinful people. In this one, Lough Linger, the people are all suspiciously good and pure. The town feels weirdly unbalanced. You know from the start that there must be something awful secret Lough Linger is hiding. And sure enough, it is worse than you could imagine.
My son (aged 10) and I have read all three books now, and this is his favourite, because the monster is so ghastly. I hope we'll be able to meet Andrew May and Ewan again in a new book, but their story does seem roundly finished. And I really hope to hear more about Theodora, a very interesting and significant new character introduced in this book.
This is an extremely quick read, and it has plenty of depth (pun not intended), which make it enthralling for adult readers like myself who don't normally read young persons' books.
It's a difficult one to put down once you start reading, so plan ahead.