It’s late at night, and Cassie is driving on a deserted road when she almost hits a car that seems to be broken down on the side of the road. When she drives by the car, she sees the figure of a woman on the driver side. It’s raining, and Cassie is hesitant about leaving her car to help a stranger. After mulling and weighing all the risks of helping strangers in the middle of the night, Cassie decides she is better off not getting involved and decides to drive home. The next day, Cassie learns in the news that a woman was brutally murdered on the same road around the same time she was driving the night before. Cassie becomes consumed with guilt over the fact that she didn’t stop to help the stranger, only to find out that the woman was no stranger at all but someone she once met at a party and even went out to lunch on one occasion. This knowledge plunges Cassie in a downward spiral of guilt, fear, and paranoia. Cassie, who once considered herself a little absent-minded now starts to forget everything from where she parked her car, to ordering an alarm system to her house, and buying a baby stroller when she is not even pregnant. Completely paranoid that she might be suffering from the same illness as her late mother–early onset dementia, the only people Cassie can rely on are her husband Matthew and her best friend, Rachael.
The Breakdown is the third book I read from B.A. Paris, and just like my last review on Bring Me Back, The Breakdown has a solid premise. Unfortunately, B.A Paris once again makes similar mistakes to her earlier novel. Unlike Bring Me Back where the end is entirely improbable, you figure out the plot of The Breakdown half-way through the book, and what follows is a series of Cassie’s constant whiny dialogues and endless pages of text messages that were completely unnecessary once you figure out the plot. The ending is anti-climatic and predictable.
On the positive side, I always give kudos to authors who can create characters that annoy me. Characters that are so well written that I can hear their voices in my head or imagine what they look like. These types of characters are alive, and Cassie was one of them, however much I disliked her as a person. For that reason and the fact that the book holds a lot of suspense and interest for the first half of the book, I’m recommending it to fans of the genre.
