A damaged family. An overprotective father. A daughter with a new perfect boyfriend. What can go wrong? 

It is another book from a bookish advent calendar I got from my friend as my birthday gift. The first one was not a roaring success, but since I read it, it got me out of a reading slumber, so I decided to stick with crime/thriller genre until I feel more confident in my reading mojo.

The premise here again is quite simple. A father meets his daughter’s new boyfriend. And it really does not go too well. The instant dislike, but also a sense of danger, make it impossible for Ed to accept Ryan, as his precious daughter’s partner. The trouble is that Aby is smitten with Ryan, and Claire, Ed’s wife, also sees Ed as being overprotective. At the end of the day, the young couple drops another bombshell – they plan to get married, and quickly.

So Ed starts digging. But also gets more and more in his own head, struggling to judge what is only his mind’s figment and what things he can prove. Again nothing surprising in the story, but the tension is built so well. We struggle together with Ed to judge what is real. We feel the paranoia building. We feel his claustrophobia and desperation as the wedding date nears.

Again like I mentioned in the review of the previous book from the calendar there are only a few ways in which those plots can resolve. And yet I have been led astray a good few times, casting my suspicions the wrong way. Some things I didn’t expect happened, and so I kept reading. 

This is one of those run-of-them-mill thrillers that keep you hooked, that you race through because you want to validate your suspicions, but also because on some level you do care about the main character. It gave me a good few hours of exciting escapism, surprised me, and kept me reading.

I do not expect much from this type of book, basically just decent entertainment. And this is well provided here. It is not a book written in a beautiful literary style, or touching on important social topics. But it does well what it sets out to do – to draw you in, make you care, and keep you reading, pulling you into some pitfalls along the way. A well-paced thriller that that delivers in spades. What a lovely change from the previous torturous book.

Photo by Violetta Kaszubowska