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| ★★★✰✰ |
Synopsis: You love your family. They make you feel safe. You trust them. Or do you…? When fifteen-year-old Billy Wilkinson goes missing in the middle of the night, his mother, Claire Wilkinson, blames herself. She's not the only one. There isn't a single member of Billy's family that doesn't feel guilty. But the Wilkinson’s are so used to keeping secrets from one another that it isn't until six months later, after an appeal for information goes horribly wrong, that the truth begins to surface. Claire is sure of two things – that Billy is still alive and that her friends and family had nothing to do with his disappearance. A mother's instinct is never wrong. Or is it?
***
Review: This was a pretty enjoyable, easy to read and (for me, although that's not saying much!) unpredictable thriller. Initially I had rated it four stars, but upon reflection it hasn't really stuck with me sufficiently to warrant that rating, so I'm knocking it down to three. All the same, it is absolutely perfect if want you want is an easy thriller to blaze through in an afternoon or evening, and I definitely want to check out more by this author.
The characters in the book are pretty likeable for the most part, but I did feel they suffered a little from the paranoia found in The Ice Twins - a family who thought they knew each other breaking apart due to the loss of a child and suddenly nobody knows who to trust in the family. That said, this book is infinitely better than The Ice Twins, so if you're stuck between the two, pick this one. Seriously.
The only thing that causes a real mystery here is the blackouts the main character, Claire, has. These make her an unreliable narrator who knows as little as the reader about both her own actions and what is going on around her. It also makes the book pretty compelling - more so than wanting to know what happened to Billy, I wanted to know why Claire was having these blackouts and why she was doing the inexplicable things she was doing.
I found the ending very underwhelming though, and I think that might have been the deciding factor in my decision to knock it down to three stars. It's grand, but nothing amazing.
Rating: 3/5
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