Tasha and her older sister Alice may look alike, but they couldn’t be more different. Tasha’s married with two children and still lives in their hometown near Bristol. Alice is a high-flying scientist who travels the world with her equally successful husband.
Yet each sister would trust the other with her life.
When Tasha and her husband Aaron need a break and Alice offers to stay in their home with the kids, Tasha knows her family is in safe hands.
She couldn’t be more wrong.
The call from home is devastating. Alice and her husband Kyle have been attacked, leaving Alice in intensive care and Kyle dead. Rushing to the hospital, Tasha finds the police trying to piece events together. She can’t think why anyone would attack her sister.
Then the note arrives, addressed to Tasha:
It was supposed to be you . . .
Every family has secrets. Some more deadly than others. (Pub Date: Aug 05 2025)
During a life switch between sisters, both are attacked on the same day, and one of them loses her husband in the event. In the house, a DNA of a sibling is found, and it doesn't match with either of them. Could this all be related to their baby sister, taken away when she was still a baby?
3.5 rounded up to 4. Maybe even 3.75.
This is a thriller with multiple points of view, but mainly Tasha's, the middle sister. It wasn't her husband she lost in the attack, but it does make her reevaluate their relationship as old insecurities surface. Yes, the keyword for this character is insecurity. She's always felt excluded from the bond her mother and her olde sister had. She watches her older sister lead a glamourous life with her rich husband, while her own is pretty much mediocre. As you can see, although there is a lot happening around Tasha, a lot of the book is about her psyche, while the discoveries take a secondary role. And thus, it's a slower thriller.
Being slow doesn't make it boring. The feeling that tables will turn any minute is constant as we wait for the results of the ongoing investigation. So while I'm not usually a fan of slow, this wasn't a book that made me want to shake the characters and scream, Do something! Instead, I wanted to see how the family dynamics would change as new facts came up. Though I'll say I wasn't fond of any of the characters. They were too weird, acted too erratically, and not only for reasons of making everyone a suspect.
As for conclusion, it could have been better. Although I wouldn't say it leaves plotholes, they try to answer everything, but some answers were too superficial. So that's where you'll leave it? No consequences? Which has the same aftertaste as an unresolved issue to me. And one of them, which is supposed to answer the big mystery in the book, was creative but nearly magical. I'm not sure the elements to figuring it out in the book were enough to make it the awesome piece of the puzzle it could have been. Again, not a good aftertaste.
I still enjoyed this read very much. It's well crafted and different from other books.
Honest review based on an ARC provided by Netgalley. Many thanks to the publisher for this opportunity.
Rating: 4 out of 5.
No comments:
Post a Comment