After I finished the first few chapters of this book, I was pretty sure I wasn't going to care much what happens to Aubrey Hamilton, the central female character. Her much-loved husband Josh went missing five years earlier after mysteriously failing to show up at a friend's bachelor party. As the prime suspect, Aubrey was arrested, charged and put on trial but acquitted for lack of evidence; now, and her nasty mother-in-law Daisy finally succeeded in her quest to have her son declared legally dead.
When Aubrey meets a new guy (about whom I'll provide no details so as not to spoil it for anyone else), she turns into the angst-ridden, hand-wringing female who questions everything everyone says or does - including herself - and I got that old familiar feeling of, "Oh no - not another of those wishy-washy women I so dislike."
But then - thanks to chapters that switch back and forth among various characters (including Aubrey) and time periods, I began to realize what Aubrey was all about. This is a technique that's been overused in books of late, IMHO, but in this case, the author has used it to, in effect, build layers of each character that results in an ending that came as a bit of a surprise to me.
Bottom line? This is a good one, folks! I thank the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing me an advance copy in exchange for a review (it's scheduled for release on March 22).
No One Knows by J.T. Ellison (Gallery Books, March 2016); 384 pp.
No comments:
Post a Comment