Veronica Cavanaugh's grasp on the world is slipping. Her latest round of fertility treatments not only failed but left her on edge and unbalanced. And her three-year-old daughter, Elizabella, has a new imaginary friend, who seems much more devilish than playful. So when Veronica's husband fails to return home from a business trip, what's left of her stability begins to crumble.
Given her family's history of mental illness, and Elizabella's insistence that her daddy is dead, Veronica starts questioning herself. Every move she makes is now suspect. Worse still, Veronica is positive that someone wants her and her daughter dead, too-unless it's all in her mind...
Somewhere beneath her paranoia is the answer to her husband's vanishing. To find it, she's led to a house in the Florida Keys. But once there, she isn't sure she wants to know the truth.
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I know kids have active imaginations - and I have actually heard of invisible playmates - but this goes beyond what I'd consider normal. CHAPTER 1, NOVEMBER 10
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(Lake Union Publishing 1 April 2018, 352 pages, ebook, borrowed from @AmazonKindle #PrimeReading)
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This is an incredible book. It's the kind of thriller I love; fast-paced, intense, full of twists and turns to the point you don't know what's really going on and who is the bad guy / villain. The book is well-written and compelling. Once I sat down to read it I didn't want to stop reading because I was enjoying the book so much. I had so many questions as I read. What happened to Micah? Is Veronica crazy? Why does Elizabella's imaginary friend seem so real? The answers are drip fed very slowly, forcing you to read on to make sense of it all. When Micah goes missing it seems a simple missing person case (if there's such a thing) but then disturbing discovers raise even more questions. Why does Veronica have the deed to a house in Key West and how could her husband never have discussed it with her? Why was he paying for their fertility treatment with his credit card and why was their insurance cancelled? Why does the company he supposedly worked for not exist? Why were they behind in their mortgage payments and why did he keep this from his wife? Veronica, suspected by the police as hiding something flees to the house in Key West where even darker secrets wait. This is a corker of a thriller.
