Published By: Bantam
Pages: 400
Released On: 17/07/2025
She didn’t see it coming . . .
And neither will you.
Bryden and Sam have it all – thriving careers, a smart apartment in a luxury condominium, supportive friends and a cherished daughter. The perfect life for the perfect couple.
Then Sam receives a call at his office. Bryden – working from home that day – has failed to collect their daughter from daycare.
Arriving home with their little girl, he finds his wife’s car in the underground garage. Upstairs in their apartment her laptop is open on the table, her cell phone nearby, her keys in their usual place in the hall.
Except Bryden is nowhere to be seen. It’s as if she just walked out.
How can she have disappeared from her own home? And did she even leave the building at all?
With every minute that passes – and as questions swirl around their community – Bryden and Sam’s past seems a little less perfect, their condominium less safe, their friends, neighbours and relatives no longer quite so reliable . . .
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Bantam for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
A new Shari Lapena book is always cause for celebration. Even though this is only my 4th of hers, she has become a go-to author for thrillers. And she is an author I only discovered through my book blog and I am thrilled that I did.
She might not have seen it coming; I definitely didn’t see it coming.
This is a slow burn thriller. A bit more psychological, than sitting on the edge of your seat looking over your shoulder. You get time to know the characters and the situation; it almost lulls you into a false sense of security and you become part of the story.
I always find Shari’s characters are well written. They’re very real and familiar. They’re not all nice characters, and they’re not all “goodies”, but you love them all individually, even the “baddies” to a certain extent. They’re neither black nor white, everything is a bit grey morally, which I think is important in a thriller.
It is multi-layered but doesn’t feel overwhelming. And like any good thriller, it’s full of twists and turns and shocks.
I had my suspicions, people I thought could be guilty, but every time I thought I’d got it, something else happened that blew that out of the water.
I read it in less than a day, even sacrificing sleep, because it was just so easy to read and I couldn’t put it down.
My one negative comes with the ending. It’s just a bit too abrupt. We’ve got this investigation going on for about 95% of the book and then suddenly it’s all over. It’s a perfectly good ending, the ending itself is not the problem. I just wish it had come in earlier, been drawn out slightly more so we could really get absorbed into the reveal. Because at the moment it’s story, story, story, reveal, finished. And it just felt a bit too quick for such a detailed story.
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