Or, more accurately, the one who left her for someone else. But Townsend swears he’s a changed man, and Talia wants to believe him. Even if he is the prime suspect in the disappearance of Amanda Reade, the same woman who broke them up in the first place.
In cases like these, it’s always the boyfriend. That’s what Amanda’s sister Kaitlyn thinks. So does Talia’s colleague Meera Ratnam—and she’ll risk everything to convince Talia that she’s making a deadly mistake.
Then Talia starts receiving menacing texts from Amanda. Suddenly, no one knows what to believe. Is Townsend guilty? Is Amanda alive? Or is someone playing games?
I’m still confused as to why this story was told in third person when the chapters are supposedly coming from a specific character’s point of view. Yes, I always understood whose chapter I was reading , whether it be Townsend, Talia, or whoever else, but then seeing lines like “Townsend was envious that…” created this strange distance that constantly pulled me out of the story. If we’re meant to be inside a character’s head, then commit to that perspective. Instead, the narration felt oddly detached and more distracting than immersive.
Unfortunately, I also figured out what was happening fairly early on, which took away much of the suspense. I will give the author credit for trying to obscure things by introducing plausible alternatives and emphasizing that some narrators might be unreliable, but for me the identity and motivation behind everything became a little too obvious. And it wasn’t just one moment that tipped me off; there were multiple passages that made me stop and think, yeah… it’s definitely this person.
Even if I hadn’t caught on as early as I did, a later chapter would have confirmed it anyway. That same chapter also left me with a lingering question: why would you loan your favorite book to the one person who knows you best when the similarities between fiction and reality were so obvious they were bound to come back to haunt you? It felt less like a believable character decision and more like a setup designed purely to move the plot forward.
There were also several moments where the internal logic of the story didn’t quite hold up. Once Townsend and Talia become engaged, her home becomes uninhabitable, yet she initially balks at moving in with him because doing so should be a “momentous step, not a temporary fix.” That reasoning immediately made me wonder what she thought marriage was going to look like, because living together is kind of inevitable at that point. Similarly, there’s a mention of Townsend receiving a subpoena connected to an investigation into his company, yet it’s served via email, a detail that felt oddly unrealistic.
The side-plots didn’t help matters much either. Amanda and her sister Kaitlyn, in particular, were difficult to take seriously at times. The explanation surrounding their parents’ car accident (that Amanda hitting a curb days earlier may have caused a wheel misalignment severe enough to lead to the crash), felt almost laughable. If the alignment had truly been that bad, someone would have noticed immediately upon driving the car again. Instead, the situation once again came across as forced rather than convincing.
However, one of my biggest struggles with this novel was that absolutely none of the characters had redeeming qualities. Townsend is the rich guy with a trust fund he can’t access and an inflated sense of entitlement. In fact, he is so determined to maintain appearances that he lies about the success of his struggling start-up rather than admit he needs help. Talia is equally frustrating, repeatedly choosing a relationship over her friendships while remaining unwilling to acknowledge the truth even when it’s directly in front of her. Amanda being difficult at least felt intentional, so I could accept that, but Kaitlyn’s immediate conviction that Townsend was guilty, despite knowing absolutely nothing about him, escalated into behavior that bordered on stalking and felt excessive. Meera was perhaps the character I wanted to like the most because of her loyalty, yet her constant pessimism dragged the story down, and her later decisions made little sense given that she knew Talia wouldn’t believe her anyway.
All of these issues were already adding up, but none of them compared to my reaction to the ending. After everything the story spent time building toward, the conclusion felt abrupt and oddly unsatisfying. Rather than delivering an emotional payoff, it left me feeling like the rug had been pulled out from under the narrative in a way that didn’t feel earned. By the final page, I wasn’t shocked or moved, just confused (and a little pissed off) about what the ending was supposed to accomplish.
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