From the author of The Downstairs Neighbor and The Other Guest comes a propulsive suspense novel that asks how far you would go to keep a friend’s secret.
Lucy and her husband, Adam, have been best friends with another couple, Cora and Scott, for years. The four are practically family at this point—they vacation together, co-own a beach cottage, and their young children are inseparable. So Lucy is devastated when, while looking at a colleague’s photos of a trip to the Maldives, she spots a picture of Scott, apparently on a luxurious holiday with another woman.
Lucy is determined to protect her best friend from her husband’s seeming infidelity, but when she learns that the woman in the photo has gone missing, she can’t help but fear that Scott was involved. As she searches for answers, she uncovers secrets about her friends and her own husband that could destroy the wonderful lives they have built…and she suspects that everybody around her knows much more about the missing woman than they are letting on. Is Lucy actually the one most in the dark? If so, what are the consequences of discovering the truth?
My thoughts: a glimpse of a photo with a familiar face, but the woman with him isn’t his wife, sends Lucy off down a wormhole into her best friends’ (and husband’s) past. What happened at university, how are they connected to a death in the Maldives and why can’t Lucy just leave it alone?
It gets tenser and tenser as Lucy digs into events that bound her husband Adam to his best pals, Cora and Scott, back when they were students, secrets they’ve been keeping for years, but it seems someone knows what they did, could it be the mysterious Juliet? And it involves Lucy’s newlywed colleague Ruth now in some way.
It gets ugly, and violent, with one of the trio willing to kill to keep the status quo. How much danger is Lucy in? Well, read it and find out. Also, modern children clearly have no curiosity, or at least the ones here don’t, happily playing while their parents argue and discuss murder. I’d have been under the table taking notes, Harriet the Spy style.
Gripping, a bit creepy at times, Scott needs to chill, as does Adam, they’re all a little unhinged to be honest. I rooted for Lucy, but also worried for her safety as she kept hanging around potential murderers. The ending, while not happy, at least meant I could relax, safe that Lucy and her children were out of harm’s way, for now.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 