This debut novel was a little dark and twisted, and I liked it!
Olivia “Liv” Lapin and her friend, Julia Spunk, are running through the woods one day fThis debut novel was a little dark and twisted, and I liked it!
Olivia “Liv” Lapin and her friend, Julia Spunk, are running through the woods one day for track practice. Liv sprints on ahead of Julia. When Julia catches up to her, she finds her friend lying on the ground with a man on top of her armed with a knife. He tells Julia that he will kill Liv if she doesn’t leave. Julia does the unexpected. She rushes toward the man, and he grabs her by the ankle and pulls her down. The distraction is enough for Liv to get out from underneath him. Rather than help her friend who just saved her life, Liv turns and runs away and leaves Julia with the madman.
Then the story moves ahead by almost one year, and we learn that Julia was held captive by Donald Jessup for two days. She has Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and remembers little of the incident. Her therapist, Dr. Ricker, wants to hypnotize her to bring the memories to the surface. Sometimes a smell will trigger a memory, but Julia pushes it back down.
The body of a female jogger who disappeared the previous year is found in the same woods where Liv and Julia were attacked. Is there a connection between the two crimes?
You would think that Liv would be grateful to Julia for saving her life and be relieved that they were both safe, but she’s not! She’s stand-offish, and their friendship is strained. Does she feel guilty that she got away and Julia didn’t? There’s definitely more to the story.
I love flawed characters, and this book is full of them! This story was darker than I expected, but I liked it! It had some interesting plot developments that took me by surprise, and I will definitely look for Kim Savage’s sophomore novel when it comes out!
The Sinclairs are a wealthy family. They spend their summers on their own private island off the coast of Massachusetts, where Harris Sinclair built aThe Sinclairs are a wealthy family. They spend their summers on their own private island off the coast of Massachusetts, where Harris Sinclair built a home for himself and one for each of his three daughters: Carrie, Bess, and Penny. The main character in the story is 17-year-old Cadence Sinclair Eastman, whose mother is Penny. The story then goes back in time to the summer when Cadence was 15 years old, and that was when her dad left her mom for another woman. She spends the summer at Beechwood Island with her relatives, like any other year, but something traumatic happens to Cadence and she has no memory of the incident. She remembers plunging into the ocean, and she is left with migraine headaches caused by traumatic brain injury. She is given prescription drugs for the pain, but it doesn’t help very much. The following summer, rather than spend it with her relatives on Beechwood Island, she goes on a 10-week trip to Europe with her father. She sends emails to her cousins, telling them how much she is missing them with their first summer apart, but no one writes her back. The following summer, she returns to Beechwood Island and that’s where the story finally unravels and we find out what happened to Cadence.
The story was really slow and dragged in the middle, with not a lot was going on. The last 75 pages were where everything finally came together, and that is what saved the story. Ms. Lockhart totally blindsided me with the truth that I never saw coming, and I love it when an author can do that! There is a twist within a twist, and that’s really all that I can say without any spoilers. Ms. Lockhart also incorporates an unusual way of story-telling, where she inserts fairy tales that incorporate members of the Sinclair family and which give you clues as to what is going on.
So, if you are looking for something a little different and don’t mind a slow build-up, the ending is definitely worth it!
The narrator, Ariadne Meyers, is new-to-me and was fantastic! She conveyed all the right emotions with the tone of her voice, and her pacing was on queue. She carried the story through the slow parts and, for me, that’s when I’m thankful that I’m listening to an audiobook rather than reading it.
I received a complimentary copy of this audiobook for voluntary review consideration.
Loading...
