My rating: 5 of 5 stars
“Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.”
----Elie Wiesel, a Romania-born American novelist, political activist, and Holocaust survivor of Hungarian Jewish descent
Catherine Hunt, an English journalist/writer, pens her debt psychological thriller, Someone Out There that is centered around a divorce lawyer whose life goes haywire or rather say becomes deadly when she takes up a particular case of a woman trying to get a divorce from her claimed to be abusive husband.
Synopsis:
Top divorce lawyer, Laura Maxwell, appears to have it all – perfect career, perfect husband, perfect life. But how well do you really know the people around you? All it takes is one tiny crack to shatter the whole façade.
A series of accidents leads Laura to believe that someone out there is deliberately trying to harm her. The fear starts to pervade every part of her life, affecting her work and her marriage. Increasingly, she feels that no one believes her story, and she must face down her attacker alone. One woman, fighting to survive in a nightmare world.
Laura Maxwell is a successful divorce lawyer in London with a perfectly blissful marital life and a handsome husband, Joe. Unfortunately, Laura's nightmares of someone trying to kill her gets worse when she unfateful accidents after accidents started happening where she nearly got killed, only problem was that apart from herself, no one believed the fact that someone was genuinely trying to harm her physically. This events became more regular when she took up Anna Pelham's divorce case and given the history of Anna's husband's abusive as well as aggressive behavior, it became easy for Laura to identify the person who is trying to kill her. Little did she knew, behind the accidents there was a person who is not interested in Laura's case or anything, it was pure revenge and jealousy. The only question was who and why?
The author's writing is really articulate and the way she have unfolded this story with enough tension and tight mystery, that it immediately engages the minds of the readers and keep them hooked on to it till the very last page. The author have build the tension with a steady pace and the mystery kicks right in the moment when Laura realizes that she alone has to watch out for herself from some unknown entity trying to kill her.
The pacing is really fast since the recurring events and its consequences happen very fast. The narrative is evocative and free-flowing and the mystery is very tightly wrapped under layers of misdirection and brain-twisting clues. The book makes the readers sweat out with anticipation as of who is actually trying to harm this successful lawyer.
The characters are all very strongly developed and given that this is a psychological thriller, the author goes at length in explaining the back story of her main characters, which helps the readers to contemplate with the flaws of the characters. Laura is a smart and brave protagonist who, given the height of her success has made a quite a number of enemies, knew that someone was actually trying to kill her. Laura's domestic life too falls a victim to this killer's dark motives and Laura who just like any other wives never ever doubted her husband over anything, and I really loved how the author transformed her into someone determined with a lot of self-respect within few deadly events. But there is a lot of emotions attached with each and every characters, since the author wants the readers not to hate anyone of the characters because of their flaws, or rather say, wants her readers to understand the reason behind the characters' action.
The author's writing has also another quality, simplicity and vividness. Each and every adrenaline rushing deadly accidents are strikingly portrayed which makes the readers feel like as if it is happening right in front of their eyes. The story itself is so compelling from the very first page, that it made me an instant fan of this debut author and would be eagerly looking forward in reading this author's future books.
Verdict: A must read book for all the psychological thriller fans.
Courtesy: Thanks to the author, Catherine Hunt, for providing me with a copy of her book, in return for an honest review.
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Author Info:
I have no idea what I would do in Laura's situation and it does sound like a petrifying one to be in! It would be sure to make you incredibly paranoid as well. I think I am going to try this one, especially as I love thrillers myself as well. Great review ^.^
ReplyDeleteThanks a lot for stopping by! :-)
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