Elizabeth "Beth" May is a liar. Running from a traumatic and notorious childhood, she lies to protect herself. She lies about her job, she lies about her name (Liz, Lizzie, Beth etc.), and her career as a traveling nurse fits her like a glove. She keeps moving, never settling in one spot for long - although she's made the fatal mistake of falling in love with Santa Cruz, California. She's been there for a while, long enough for a stalker to find her.
It starts off as harmless pranks. Getting put on the mailing list for Liars Anonymous. But then someone impersonates her online, starts bad-mouthing her employer, and nearly gets her fired. When someone flips the power off on her rental unit and then pushes her into traffic? Yeah, needless to say Beth starts to question everything. Who is stalking her and who can she trust? Certainly not the nice guy one-night-stand who showed up just as the stalking started. What about the "online friend" she's never met in person? Ha! And certainly not the police. The one thing Beth clearly learned from her childhood? Don't trust the police.
I'll be honest, this was a second half book for me mainly because I didn't find Beth all that interesting. I've always said I don't have to "like" a character to enjoy the book, but the problem here is that Beth isn't likeable and there's not much to hold on to to get past that. Basically I spent the whole first half of the book wanting to shake her until her teeth rattled and drag her to a therapist. It's the same problem I have with a lot of unreliable narrator protagonists. Beth isn't unreliable per se but you're trapped in her head for the entire book and not only isn't it terribly riveting, it's also kind of exhausting. It's not really until Beth gets pushed out into traffic while walking around Santa Cruz that this book started to really grab my intention.
I stuck with it because as a long-time suspense reader I know enough to know when a twist is coming - and yes, this one has a twist. A pretty good one actually. I feel like this is a book that begs for content warnings but to provide them is essentially a giant ol' spoiler - so just know that it's all wrapped up in childhood trauma. Which, quite obviously, Beth has not been dealing with other than lying to everyone she comes into contact with to protect herself.
Ultimately I think that's my issue with this story, although I'm not sure the author could have resolved it without getting the pacing and plot lost in the weeds. Beth never really unpacks her trauma and how that led her to becoming a lying liar who lies. Not only from her childhood but the fact that she was a nurse at the height of the pandemic ("we" as a society have not truly reckoned with the trauma our health care professionals endured during the pandemic - but that's another book for another day). This ends "happily" (in the way suspense novels end "happily") albeit quite messily. This one had all the ingredients I've enjoyed in a lot of suspense novels over the years (quietly menacing, messy heroine etc.) but it fell in that nebulous no man's land between OK and Good for me. I mean, it's not a dud, but it never quite elevated itself for me. There is stuff to unpack here though, so very much mileage gonna vary.
Final Grade = B-
1 comment:
To get a B for you (even a minus one) is already high praise, but I take to heart the "trapped in the head of someone who is both unlikable and uninteresting"--I can take the former, but my reading mojo is far too fragile as it is, to subject it to the second.
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