Dunia Ahmed lives an ordinary life—or she definitely used to. Now she’s the subject of a true crime podcast. She’s been missing for over a year, and no one knows if she’s dead or alive. But her story has listeners obsessed, and people everywhere are sporting merch that demands “Find Dunia!”
In the days before her disappearance, Dunia is a successful pharmacist living in New York. The daughter of Pakistani immigrants, she’s coping with a broken engagement and the death of her mother. But then something happens that really shakes up her world: someone tries to murder her.
When her would-be killer winds up dead, Dunia figures the worst is over. But then there’s another attempt on her life…and another. And police suspect someone close to her may be the culprit. Dunia struggles to make sense of what’s happening. And as childhood superstitions seep into her reality, she becomes convinced that someone—or something—is truly after her.

I enjoyed Amina Akhtar’s ‘Kismet‘, a clever, witty gothic thriller that kept me turning the pages, so I was keen to try ‘Almost Surely Dead‘, especially as it was described as a psychological thriller with some supernatural elements.

The opening scene, which was an attempt on the life of the main character, Dunia Ahmed, was beautifully done: immediately immersive, exciting, tense and intriguing. If this opening had been a series pilot, I’d have signed up to binge-watch the next three episodes immediately.

I liked the interweaving of the story of five-year-old Dunia with the Dunia in her thirties timeline. The ‘voice’ given to young Dunia was engaging and the events, filtered through the perceptions of a child, were intriguing.

Initially, I thought the addition of a present-day podcast taking a retrospective view of the events being described in the older Dunia story was a good way of increasing the tension by planting doubt and foreshadowing. Personally, I dislike true crime podcasts and this podcasting pair reminded of all the reasons I don’t listen to them.

For the first third of the book, things were going reasonably well. There’d been a second attempt on Dunia’s life, she was surrounded by people who were hard to trust and everything I learned about her childhood suggested that I’d be bumping into the supernatural or at least the very strange, pretty soon.

By the halfway mark, things were going less well. For me, the tension dissipated. I should have been turning pages more eagerly than I was. Partly, that was because I wasn’t invested in the grown-up version of Dunia. There didn’t seem to be much about her to hold onto. She was passive, dependent and insecure. That matched well with her backstory but it didn’t make me cheer her on. Shortly before I abandoned the book, Dunia was taking self-defence classes and telling herself she was a survivor, not a victim. But I didn’t believe her. Maybe, in the second half of book, she comes into her power and takes control of her life but I wasn’t sure that I’d believe that either.

The podcast also started to irritate me. To me, it felt like a tease that was interrupting the story and slowing it down. The effect on me was to lower the tension in the story.

 I hesitated to set the book aside when I had less than half of it to go. I’d have liked to have found out if was right in my guesses about what was going on and who the bad guys were but I found that I didn’t care enough about what happened to Dunia to stick around and find out.

This is a book with a lot of potential and your reading experience may be different than mine. If you read it and enjoy it, please share your thoughts here or send me a link to your review.