A fear-induced split-second decision goes terribly wrong, altering the fate of three strangers.
It's New Year's Eve. Shae Wilmont, the adored celebrity host of IShop—a popular shopping site—is ready to reclaim her life. Her stalker has been caught. But en route to a party, a harrowing encounter lands her in the wrong place at the wrong time. She panics. And trusts her gut. It's a devastating mistake.
Only one person knows where she ends up. It's where no one can find her.
Shae's stunned fans quickly galvanize to track her down. Yet the charismatic Shae they know, who delivers digital intimacy to viewers who'll buy anything she sells, off camera is an enigma—private and strangely insecure—unable to let anyone get close. When startling personal secrets are exposed during the investigation, the paradox of Shae begins to unravel.
In this dark psychological suspense, the lives of three strangers collide irreversibly. Honey, a displaced Southern girl with a painful past, is fiercely protective of her friends at the expense of her own safety, derailing her new life in California. Creepy Lawrence, a Detective Bureau fast-tracker with a penchant for latex gloves and a perverse obsession with Shae. And Shae, with millions of fake friends but hardly a real one. All three are hiding something, but only two of them are lying.
The beginning was quite creepy and the presentation of the three main characters was pretty interesting. We have Shae, a famous host of the Ishop channel, receiving disturbing letters from a fan; Lawrence, a weird guy seemingly obsessed with her; and Honey, a young woman trying to find her way in the world after a recent loss. When their lives collide everything you thought you knew about them will be blown to pieces!
I wasn’t sure at first when the story took such a different direction from the initial premise. I had set my mind to read a classic stalker story so the twist felt a bit discombobulating. Honey made a complete 180 in just a matter of chapters. Which one was the real one, the one we first met in the diner or the second one? She was a catalogue of bad decisions and I don’t think some of them were justified enough.
Halfway through there was another twist I didn’t see coming and that had the potential to change the course of the story again, but at the end I don’t think we got all the explanations the twist deserved.
It was clear from the start that there wouldn’t be no happy ending for some of them, question was who would be the one suffering the consequences. I was glad with the one that ended up doing it but there could have been a bit more tension in those last chapters.
Surprising turns and bizarre and wacky characters, and while I enjoyed it for the most part I’m still wondering if I would have liked it better had it been the story I had first imagined in my head. All in all it intrigued me enough to make me wanna read “The memory box”, the author’s debut.
Thank you to NetGalley, Fine Line Publishing and Eva Lesko Natiello for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.
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