Michelle Davies has crafted one of the best thrillers I've ever read, honestly.

It's rare for me to get so caught up in a thriller novel. Normally, I know what's coming and just bumble along and read it for the fun. With this book, I had so many theories about what was going on and it was exciting! The twists and turns along the way had me recrafting my theories until I was almost spot on near the end. The entire story is written well that it all builds on each other, until you come to the finale and everything just clicks.

Maggie Neville is a Family Liaison Officer who is dealing with two crimes at the same time. An elderly woman has been attacked, and it appears to be the same duo hurting other elderly ladies who live alone. And then a husband and wife appear to have been in a scuffle, possibly from a domestic dispute. And then, she realizes they might not be so different from each other...

There's so many parts to this story. Sadie, the elderly lady who was attacked, has only her granddaughter Della as a family member. That family has drama since Della's Mother long since disappeared and never returned. Della believes her Mother attacked Sadie. Then there's Eleanor, who was attacked by her husband in a domestic dispute. Add in that Maggie has her own dark secrets that could tear her family apart, and that her co-workers are trying to find the duo who were attacking old ladies... There's a lot going on.

Despite all of these interconnecting plot lines, the story is packed tight perfectly. I never felt like the plots were too much! Michelle spends enough time on each plot line that when it switches over to another character, I'm not disappointed. I honestly was surprised with how great this book worked for me. I need the rest of this series STAT!

I'd highly recommend this book. I am totally impressed and even managed to go through it a second time to see what I missed. This perfectly crafted book needs an audience! It'd be a real shame for it not to grab it!

Side Note: You do not need to read the rest of this series to know what's going on. You get filled in with enough information to know what's happening.

Five out of five stars!

I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads. ( )

CONTAINS SPOILERS

The blurb makes it sound as if the story is mostly about Eleanor and Simon aka the query murder/ suicide case where both victims survive, but in fact more time is devoted to the attack on pensioner Sadie with the missing daughter Helen. Then, of course, both cases merge in a rather unlikely way, which is handy as Maggie is the FLO appointed to both...

I found this novel interesting and fairly fast-paced, but struggled to keep going at one point: Renshaw was being horrible to Maggie, Will had dumped her, Lou was being a terrible sister, mother and general human being etc etc. However, I pushed through and things picked up, although I wish Maggie had dwelt longer on the realization that it is a really bad idea to date your boss. (I wouldn't date hime anyway.) Bea's character seemed a bit off - I know she was only 14, but her plan to keep going to the hospital to apologize... Della was also rather tiresome. Eleanor/Gillian's motivation being "general madness" was lazy writing/plotting.

I'm glad Maggie's big secret about Jerome has come out, although her parents seem to swing wildly between favouring one daughter over the other. Looking forward to the next one. ( )