This domestic thriller follows Olivia Sutherland as she is freed from prison 5 years after being convicted of plotting to murder him. Now that she's free, she has three goals: repair her relationship with her daughter, clear her name, and bring down her husband who framed her.
TW/CW: drug abuse, drug overdose, police corruption, infidelity, incarceration
Domestic thrillers are usually solid, middle of the road reads for me. I don't pick up a ton, and the ones I do are normally good, but nothing about them really sticks with me. This one, on the other hand, I really enjoyed. It was the perfect balance of domestic drama plus over-the-top situations. It was a fun, twisty read that I would highly recommend, especially for a summer vacation read.
I really enjoyed the cast of characters and their different relationships. We don't get a ton of backstory on any of them, even Olivia and her husband, but the current relationships are so well developed I didn't mind at all. We know the basic info, but we don't get any long info dumps or flashbacks to flesh out the early parts of these relationships. And big plus for having all the characters having very distinct names so I could actually keep them all straight in my head (no Maria/Mary/Maggie here, for example). While Olivia is the protagonist we are mostly following, we do get some multi-POV chapters from other characters that played a big role in the story. These other POV chapters made it easy to sneak in some more information about them as well as give the reader information that Olivia doesn't have (or at least doesn't have until later in the story).
The justice/prison system does play a pretty big role in this story and I thought it was handled well (with the caveat that I don't have first hand experience). I liked how Olivia keeps in touch with some of the women she met in prison instead of getting out and immediately reverting back to her previous way of life. I haven't spent 5 years in prison, but I would imagine this is more accurate, especially when those ties and friendships were pretty strong. Now, this is set in the UK and I'm in the US so I'm not sure if they have rules about being friendly with other criminals or if the justice system, in general, is shown accurately. I think the time from Olivia being arrested and then being found guilty was only a few months which I would consider fast but maybe my frame of reference isn't quite right. There was one particular plot point regarding the police that I questioned but I just suspended my questions and went along for the ride.
The pacing was fantastic and much more fast paced than most domestic thrillers I've read. I think the big difference is the choice of where to start this story. We open with Olivia's guilty verdict being read, then a 5 year time jump to when she's getting released and the story goes from there. I think a more traditional domestic thriller plot would be following the initial case and having Olivia try to prove her innocence during that trial. I really enjoyed Taylor's choice to more or less drop the reader in the middle of Olivia's messy life right when she's getting handed probably the worst news of her life. The pacing didn't let up from there and there were a number of plot-based reasons that Olivia couldn't sit around and plan for months and months. She had to act relatively quickly and take risks, which translated to great pacing and tension for the reader.
The reveals started early and kept coming. Taylor does a great job at slowly ramping up how serious these reveals are and as each new one gets revealed, there are larger and larger consequences for the story and our characters. I did guess some of the reveals ahead of time but I couldn't guess all of them so I still got some good surprises out of this read. I also enjoyed how the reveals were well spread out over the various characters/relationships instead of just one character having most of the reveals. It really helped amp up the tension because we weren't sure where the next twist would come from. There were also a few times where Olivia would go through a bullet point list of the facts that she knew up to that point and I think those moments were a nice pause for the reader to refresh their memory as well. We get a good amount of twists building on each other as well which are always a hit for me and I enjoy having the rug pulled out from under me like that.
Overall, this was a really fun and twisty read. Much more fast paced and tense than most domestic thrillers I pick up. We don't get a ton of super fleshed out characters, but I think the well developed relationships between characters more than makes up for a lack of character history.
Thanks NetGalley and Harper 360 for the ARC.
Expected publication date is June 28, 2022.
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