The Key Characters:
Casey Edwards, a girl with a lost memory.
Evie, Casey's mother, who neglects her.
Dr.Blake Hunter, who falls in love with Casey.
Ronnie, a cruel step-brother who sexually abuses Casey.
***
The Review.
The last book of Michaels, ‘Pretty Woman’ was very different. It
was about relationships, of feelings, despair, atonement, change , strength and
finally a phoenix-like resurrection.
Perhaps this gave me a sense of what to expect in her next novel
and I was shocked out of my cocoon of expectations. This one is a thriller, a
psychological one no less.
A girl with no memory of her past is found wandering the streets
of Sweetwater, Georgia and taken home by a doctor who happens to be passing by.
There begins the unraveling of the suspense of her short life-history, that involves gruesome
murders, brutal abuse, heartless neglect and suppressed horrors for Casey. And
there are people who do not want her to retrieve the memories,
someone close to her and dangerous beyond imagination. How Casey manages to
face her terrors and unravels the mysteries, while trying not to lose her mind
and stay alive at the same time, forms the crux of the story.
Casey constant struggles with endless questions about herself, tugs at the reader’s heartstrings. The angst and
confusion of a girl with no memory of her own life is captured well. The terror of
a nine-year-old child, subjected to sexual and physical abuse, and the
long-lasting repercussions of such abuse is heart-wrenching.
Dr. Blake Hunter, as Casey’s love interest is perfectly adorable,
especially since most of the other characters are painted with grey or dark
shades.
The suspense is unbearable, to a point that borders on annoyance.
There are places however, that one cannot help feeling like the obvious
questions have been left unasked or unanswered by the characters, only to
heighten the suspense for the reader, and that doesn’t ring true from the
character’s point of view.
There is a scene in which the Casey does not ask the doctor the
obvious questions that anyone in her place would have asked. But if one were to
ignore these crucial observations, the book does keep one turning pages to get
to the end.
And yes, there are some critical errors in the editing of the
prose, the main one being where the name of Casey’s mother Evie, is mistyped as
Casey, in the scene when Evie recalls her humiliation in college. However, one
can barely blame the author for the lapses of the editors.
Evie’s character is intriguing. Although her behavior is
conveniently explained as dark psychosis induced by her past, it still fails to
divulge the explanation for her obscure relationship with her daughter. This is
one of the reasons why the reader is left with a sense of incompleteness, with
unanswered questions even after putting down the book. There are a few loose
threads that fail to be tied up neatly, at the end of the story.
The main quibble I had with this book is the sheer number of
psychos in it. Every other character turns out to be ‘specially-abled’ in the
head, a rather too convenient method, to explain away several odd situations.
Too many psychos spoil the credibility of the suspense!
And although, the reader has already guessed the core answers to the
puzzles of Casey’s past life, long before the end of the novel, the action that
accompanies the unveiling of the answers undermines the predictability of the
same.
Overall, a good read for thriller lovers, who like to keep turning
pages looking for more mystery, with an ample amount of psychosis thrown in.
***
Excerpts:
Echoes
of the wounded waited in the ongoing war to survive.
We
never know as much as we think about people, even those we are closest to.
Life
was good then. She’d had hopes, dreams and expectations.As she got older, she
learned not to have expectations. That way, she knew she’d never be
disappointed.
They
say there is a moment in a man’s life, when he knows he’s met the right woman,
the one who makes his heart stand still, the one who takes him to heights of
passion he only imagines, the one who holds his heart in her hand. Right then,
Blake knew Casey was that woman.
*****
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