Author: Alex Finlay
Year published: 2024
Category: Adult fiction (thriller)
Pages: 336
Rating: 4 out of 5
Location: (my 2026 Google Reading map): Italy, USA (KS, PA, and Washington, DC)
Summary: For the past five years, Ryan Richardson has relived that terrible night. The car door ripping open. The crushing blow to the head. The hands yanking him from the vehicle. His girlfriend Ali’s piercing scream as she is taken.
With no trace of Ali or the car, a cloud of suspicion hangs over Ryan. But with no proof and a good lawyer, he’s never charged, though that doesn’t matter to the podcasters and internet trolls. Now, Ryan has changed his last name and entered law school. He's put his past behind him.
Until, on a summer trip abroad to Italy with his law-school classmates, Ryan gets a call from his father: Ali's car has finally been found, submerged in a lake in his hometown. Inside are two dead men and a cryptic note with five words written on the envelope in Ali’s handwriting: If something happens to me…
Then, halfway around the world, the unthinkable happens: Ryan sees the man who has haunted his dreams since that night.
As Ryan races from the rolling hills of Tuscany, to a rural village in the UK, to the glittering streets of Paris in search of the truth, he has no idea that his salvation may lie with a young sheriff’s deputy in Kansas working her first case, and a mobster in Philadelphia who’s experienced tragedy of his own.
Review: This is my second Alex Finlay novel, having read and liked Every Last Fear (link to my review). A thriller/mystery seemed like the perfect type of book after the past couple of books that I have read that dealt with fairly heavy topics.
It took me quite a few days to get into this book, but then I realized it is because I was working and watching World Cup Soccer and not giving the book a fair chance. So, today I promised myslef I would devote time to reading and bam! I tore through this book. There is a twist in the middle (well done, Finlay) that I did not see coming at all. After that, it's a page-turner as I wanted to know how it would all turn out.
There are three main characters who, in rotating chapters, tell the story from different perspectives and locations. I always like multiple narratives and having the characters in different locations, which really gives a sense of the story's wide scope. It's also easy to be sympathetic to most of the main characters (the mobsters, not so much) and to care what happens to them. This is especially true near the end as the tension ramps up. Kudos to Finlay for also making these characters not all good; we all have actions we're not proud of, and these characters feel more real because of it.
Challenges for which this counts:
- 20 Books of Summer
- Literary Escapes--Pennsylvania and Washington, DC
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