The Last Minute by Eleanor Updale

The Last Minute
by Eleanor Updale

The story starts 11 minutes after an explosion in an English town, and the next 59 chapters countdown the final 59 seconds before that explosion. It details the last movements of many inhabitants of the town. Several of these characters draw your suspicions, but it's only at the end that you find out if your suspicions may have been correct.

As soon as I started to read it, I thought of Mortal Chaos, how one event sparks off another until it creates a catastrophe. But in this book, you are ticking off a second in all the people's lives. That's a lot of movements of a lot of people, and you need a constant reminder of who all these people are. Because of the short chapters, you are able to whizz through the book, but you also find yourself skimming through most of it because there is too much detail.