A woman’s life is upended when her past comes back to mess with her mind in this psychological thriller full of twists and turns.
There’s no such thing as perfect. It’s been fifteen years since Carly Bennett’s mother was brutaly murdered during a home robbery. Since then, she’s worked hard to build a normal life with a stelar career as an English professor—far away from the picture perfect step family that abandoned her at boarding school.
When a male coleague is found dead in Carly’s office—her name scrawled next to his body—everything she’s strived for starts to fal apart.
There are eerie similarities to her mother’s attack, and Carly determines to find the truth. Yet things take a bizarre turn when she suddenly experiences lost time, waking up in strange places, and flashes of dormant memories . . . memories that can’t possibly be real. Because, if they are, then she was there the night her mother was killed.
Could Carly have been responsible? Or is something more sinister at play in her stepfamily’s perfect world . . .?
This eerie domestic suspense is perfect for fans of Frieda McFadden and Lisa Jewell.
Jane Haseldine is a journalist, former crime reporter, columnist, newspaper editor, magazine writer, and deputy director of communications for a governor. Jane writes the Julia Gooden mystery series including The Last Time She Saw Him, Duplicity, Worth Kiling For and You Fit the Pattern.
My thoughts: So many disturbing things start happening to Carly, her colleague is murdered in her office, she’s hallucinating and behaving strangely, her stepbrothers have reappeared in her life (and one of them is definitely a psychopath), she’s falling apart, and her annoying assistant seems to be trying to take over her job.
Luckily her kickass best friend Ava is there to dig up the dirt and try to save Carly from the step family she thought had forgotten her – since she was sent away to boarding school and her mother was murdered, she’s had no contact with them. So why are they back in her life and why is everything going so horribly wrong?
Filled with twists, and with an empathetic protagonist in Carly (although Ava is a much more entertaining character – her bag of disguises, the relationship she has with her ex-husband, her avoidance of her family, her crazy job) I liked Carly, she was innocent and a little naive at times, but a genuinely good person who didn’t deserve all the awful things that had happened to her.
I enjoyed this book, and the twist at the end was very good, I didn’t see it coming at all. Carly is very lucky that Ava is in her life and that there was at least one detective willing to listen to her as she sought to prove her innocence.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 