For this review, we’re doing something just a tad different. 😉 We joined a book club and this was the first book we read together. So we figured why not try a joint review? It could be fun or it could be a chaotic disaster. 🤷🏻♀ ️Guess we’ll find out!
Book Stats
- Publication Date: 09/04/25
- Format: ebook / audiobook
- Chapters: 83, with 1 epilogue
- Pages: 314
- Length of audiobook: 8 hr 37 min
- Narrators: Robyn Addison & Lucy Dixon
- Narrator POV: Switches between First person POV (Lucy’s) and Third person POVs (all other characters)
Shayna’s Review
Book Rating: ⭐⭐/5 stars (& no spice)
Okay, well this book was weird. The chapters are short and quick so that’s a plus, and the book started quickly. Almost immediately, there’s a teenaged girl found locked in a cellar room with a newborn baby. Lucy, the main character, is thrown into the middle of a mysterious situation and is confronted with threatening messages, a stalker, and trying to uncover secrets before it’s too late. She has only one true goal and that’s to keep her teenage son safe.
Let me just say that this is a highly rated book. It’s currently 4.3 stars on Amazon, with 1,624 reviews. Clearly I’m the odd one here because I did not like this book at all. I thought the plot sounded interesting and I had started reading it with high expectations, but I honestly wouldn’t have finished this one if it hadn’t been our book club choice. I even attempted to listen to the audiobook rather than read the ebook, but it didn’t make a difference.
The characters had no depth at all. It really felt like every character was emotionless, regardless of what situation they were dealing with. It was also odd to me that we didn’t dive in to anything. It was kind of like we just touched the surface on multiple issues.
For example, there are random characters that are mentioned, but not really explained. We might hear about how John did this or Lucy saw Tony (these aren’t actual character names), but we don’t really get to know who John or Tony are. Also, within like 3 sentences, Lucy will be like “I wonder if I should let Theo go”, “I don’t think I should”, “I let him go”. Okay, but why? I’m the kind of person who really needs logic and explanation to show me how you got from point A to point B and why you changed your mind.
Similarly, toward the end of the book, the detective in charge of the case tends to make guesses and leaps that just happen to be correct and help her solve the case. Again, there wasn’t any logic or information that helped me as a reader see how the detective reached her conclusions.
I don’t try to be harsh with my reviews, truly. But in our book club, we were actually giggling about how ridiculous some things felt to us and by the time the book ended we were kind of relieved it was over. I was unable to develop any emotional attachment to anyone so I really didn’t care what happened or who made it out alive.
Okay, one final thing and I’ll quit my ranting. I like closure in my books, but at the end of this one, we don’t get any closure about the baby. I want to know what happened to her, but maybe that’s just me. 🤷♀️
Ronni’s Review
Book Rating: ⭐⭐/5 stars (& no spice)
I have a tendency to pick up a British thriller without realizing that’s what it is. I also have a tendency to enjoy them. That’s why, when I started reading this one, and I realized it was a British thriller, I was excited! The plot is promising and intriguing, and it’s highly rated on most platforms. It was also recommended on several social media posts I’ve seen. To say I was disappointed is an understatement.
Now, it wasn’t a bad book by any means. It was just, as Shayna stated, weird. The characters don’t seem to have any depth. I never found myself connecting with any of them, and they didn’t seem to particularly latch on to any one event that happened in the story. This is a problem because some of the events in the story are very big events that should have had more consideration. The only character I even kind of liked was killed off.
Without too many spoilers here, there is one scene that I particularly cannot get out of my head. It involves cookies and is completely ridiculous in the way it was carried out. If this weren’t a book club book (and my pick, nonetheless), I would not have finished it. I would have skimmed the chapters just enough to find out what happened and then returned it to KU.
Does this mean I won’t read anything from this author again? Absolutely not! Just because I didn’t enjoy this one, doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy something else of hers. I also won’t recommend this one to anyone, though. It was definitely fast paced, though, so there’s that?
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