This domestic thriller follows partners Nathan and Oliver. The two have been together for years and seemingly have the perfect life. Nathan is a doctor and the two share a large house in Georgetown with their dog - a long way from Oliver's life as a drug addict in rural Indiana. However, the two have drifted away and have let their relationship lag which is why Oliver finds himself at Haus - a gay bathhouse - and open to the idea of actually cheating on Nathan. Olive is approached by a stranger and the two head back to a private room. However, the encounter quickly turns violent and Oliver barely escapes with his life. It may be easy to delete the hookup apps from his phone, but Oliver is having a harder time explaining away the hand-sized bruises that are forming around his neck. Fearing that Nathan with leave if he found out, Oliver is dead set on keeping Haus a secret, but the man he met there might not have the same idea.
TW/CW: drug use, drug abuse, cheating, attempted sexual assault
The pacing of this story is the most stand-out element to me. The book starts immediately with Oliver's trip to Haus and barrels forward from there. There isn't a lot of downtime but the reveals just keep coming. This was the definition of an unputdownable page turner and I flew through the book in one sitting. Most thrillers I read, especially domestic thrillers, seem to take a while to pick up the pace and really only get going after about the 50% mark. The first half of these books are often used to set up the relationship, show the cracks in the facade, and introduce a shady character or two. In this case, we know from the get go that Nathan and Oliver's relationship isn't in a good place but we don't know the details of why. We find out more details as the police investigation and Oliver's web of lies grow as the story progresses. It seemed like every new detail we got about their lives would lead to a new complication in Oliver's plan to keep everything a secret from Nathan. There's a pretty consistent ramping up of the tension and stakes as the story progresses which is how I personally enjoy my thrillers to go.
I really enjoyed the characters and their dynamics in this story but I do wish the side characters were a little more developed. This story is primarily about Oliver and Nathan's relationship and I really liked how quickly we were shown aspects of their relationship. Right from the get-go, Oliver tells us that he has to call Nathan back within an hour of his voicemail, otherwise he gets upset. Other details like who makes dinner, who drives home from the airport, etc really all come together to give the reader a view of how this relationship works. We then get the different POV of both Oliver and Nathan while they're alone and together which only deepen the character building. We see what the other person notices, what their pet peeves are, what they think about when the other person is around. I really like this way of layering character details as the story progresses instead of trying to jam everything in at the beginning or in one long info-dump. When it came to the side characters, I do wish we got more of a similar building and layering to the characters. For example, we know Oliver works as a receptionist of a friend of Nathan's and that friend and Nathan talk frequently. But we never see them talking, we never get any sort of plot outcome of them being friends, we never see a new side of Nathan through his interactions with this friend. Basically, I didn't find any real showing in the text of this relationship other than Oliver worrying that if Nathan finds out about Haus that he'd lose his job because his boss is friends with Nathan. Which is a fine place to start, but I wish we had gotten more layers of this relationship as the story progressed (maybe they weren't as good of friends as Oliver thinks, maybe Nathan owes this friend a favor, etc). I had the same sort of issue with the other side characters where they really felt just like devices to push the plot forward but I never really got a good sense of the relationships there.
My main issue with the story revolves around character motivations. I found myself suspending my disbelief a few different times when certain information was revealed because I figured we'd get more of an explanation later in the book. And while we do, technically, get a bit more explanation, it wasn't nearly to the extent that I wanted. This book is only 312 pages and there's a lot of plot packed into those pages which is why I was giving the book the benefit of the doubt that all would be explained by the end. There were some pretty big questions I had at the end that weren't really answered. There were a few that were technically explained but I didn't feel like the text supported the answer. A small example would be that Oliver feels that Nathan won't forgive him for cheating. We are never shown any reason for him to think that with the amount of certainty bordering on fear that we see in the book. Of course, no one would like that their partner cheated, but we were never shown any information to explain Oliver's visceral reaction to the idea of telling Nathan. If we had seen some conversation about how Nathan's previous boyfriend cheated and it is a complete dealbreaker now, or maybe they have a mutual friend who is cheating and Nathan doesn't understand how someone could do something so inexcusable. The strength of Oliver's reaction doesn't line up with the Nathan the reader knows so I was left a little confused. Obviously the plot of the whole book could have ended on page 5 if Oliver told Nathan, Nathan forgave him, and they went to couples therapy - so I was really waiting for a more substantial reason than what we got. This same sort of mismatch happens with a few different characters and plot lines throughout the book and when we didn't really get satisfying answers by the end, I was a little disappointed.
The story is told in dual POV and dual timeline. We get Nathan and Oliver in the present as well as some significant flashbacks to Oliver 5 years prior in Indiana. I normally really like dual POV, but this was hit and miss for me. For me, the POV switching in the beginning half was used really well to amp up the tension in the narrative. We see Oliver trying to hide his trip to Haus and then we get Nathan's perspective on how Oliver is acting. This back and forth when the lies are still (relatively) little really shows the reader what the relationship dynamic is like and how each of them read the other person's tells. However, in the latter half of the story, the POV switches came across as feeling a bit manipulative. I think my feelings about this tie together with the above point in regards to character motivation. It felt like now that more secrets were getting revealed and we were learning more about these characters and their relationship, the POV changes were used to tease and mislead the reader. It was like suddenly we were cutting away from a scene at a pivotal moment where we think X is happening but then later it is revealed that Y really happened. For me, the reveals would have been surprising enough on their own without the misleading of the strange POV switch timing. By the end, once all the information is revealed, I can understand why the scenes were cut off when they were. However, as a reader, it really felt like I could see the puppet master strings moving everything around and it did take me out of the story a bit. I did really enjoy the flashbacks to Oliver's past and I think those really helped flesh him out as a character and show some of his motivations and reasons for his current actions.
The ending was interesting. I liked the reveals and I liked the idea of the ending but I found the execution to be a little messy for my liking. I took some time to think it over, and I think my main issue is that the ending is where everything comes to a head and I think it highlighted my main issues with the character motivations and side character development. By the end, we have a lot of characters all in the same place and reveals are dropping left and right. But because of the iffy motivations and development, I wasn't sure how these reveals were landing or why certain characters were reacting in certain ways. I had a lot of "wait, if character A wants X, then wouldn't they be happy about this reveal? Why are they angry?" sort of confusion. Again, it wasn't anything like a major plot hole and most of the answers I was looking for were eventually given but in a very hand-wavy sort of way. The ending is also where we got some 'gotcha' reveals that came as a result of the POV switches happening at very convenient times which just felt a little unearned. I liked the ending plot points like as bullet points on a list (A gets revealed, which leads to B, which leads to C) but the execution of those points in the actual story left me a bit underwhelmed.
Overall, if you want a non-stop ride of a thriller, this is the one. The narrative goes pretty much 0 to 100 in the first 5 pages and then we're just holding on for the rest of the trip. However, I wanted more out of the side characters, the character motivations, as well as the ending.
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