By: Minka Kent

Audible Narration by: Carly Robins and Jane Oppenheimer

Let’s start from the beginning. Lydia marries the love of her life, Luca, and lives in her new husband’s Washington beach town. Wanting to explore the sites and get out of the house, she goes for a hike. And even though she has a GPS safety tracker on her backpack, Lydia is brutally abducted and never heard from again.

Almost 10 years later, Luca’s new wife and mother of his daughter and unborn son, Merritt, opens the door to find a scrawny, dirty, battered woman at her door. Lydia.

Merritt refuses to believe Lydia is who she says she is. Luca had her declared legally dead after years of searching for her. Now that she’s back, Lydia threatens everything Merritt holds dear – her marriage, her family, and her upscale lifestyle.

Eight months pregnant and not needing the stress this brings upon her family, Merritt chooses to wait until Luca is home from his business trip to tell him about the person claiming to be a dead woman. In the meantime, she can’t avoid running into Lydia at the grocery store or in town. It’s not until Lydia proves her knowledge of Luca’s habits, likes, and dislikes – that she wouldn’t have known unless she’d lived with him – that Merritt finally admits Lydia is who she says she is.

When Luca returns from his business trip, failing to procure new investors for their string of restaurant businesses, he is caught up on all of the things that happened in the last 10 years.

Lydia briefly recounts the torture, humiliation, and devastation brought down on her by her captor. She has the scars – and the gunshot wounds – to prove it. Luca remains cold, unmoving, almost like he’s stuck in a nightmare. Because it can’t be real. She can’t be sitting there in front of him after all these years.

Lydia finds her way through the next few weeks with the help of a kindly, but slightly eccentric, business woman, Delfine. Her new friend takes pity on Lydia and houses her and gives her clothes and necessities. Delfine warns Lydia about getting involved with Luca and Merritt. They don’t know what the married couple’s intentions are.

But Lydia has her own game to play. And she’s not going anywhere until she gets what she wants.

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This book has twists and turns on almost every page. The second I thought I’d figured out each character’s motive, I was thrown but something new. But the plot twists didn’t make the book confusing or leave any holes open.

I did get a little bored early on in the book – not that it wasn’t interesting, I was just ready for more thrilling content. The book’s first half made me think this was a contemporary novel about two families uniting as one. Where was the danger? Where were the psychological obstacles? I half-expected that someone had mislabeled this book in the wrong genre.

Trust me, they didn’t.

Yes, in the beginning, Lydia talks about some of what she endured as a prisoner, and it made me feel sad for her. However, it didn’t give me the immediate sense of fear I was looking for. Once I got deeper into the story and I was trying to predict the end of the book, I kept finding that my predictions were completely sideways and I had no idea what was really coming next.

I gave this book 4.5/5 stars because there are ways it could have earned the title “thriller” a little better. But overall, this was an interesting story. The audible narration was a little too formal for me. When someone else is reading the story, they tend to emphasize something that doesn’t fit with my interpretation of the line. My rating doesn’t reflect the narration, only the book itself.

But I do highly recommend this book to:

• Fans of light thriller
• Fans of slow burn thrillers
• Robert Dugoni fans