Part espionage, part slow-burning thriller, this one was long and slow… and normally, I don’t mind long, and I don’t mind working for a resolution, but the ending was just… disappointing.
Anna Witherall falls in love with Harry, a man she meets while starting her career as a journalist, but she ends up marrying David, a man she was friends with in college. Anna has a job she loves, twin daughters who are cared for by a loving nanny (Maria, who happens to be a childhood friend of David’s,) and David happily goes to work in his family’s business. On the surface, they have it all. But, no one is who they seem, and everyone is harboring deep secrets, which might ruin them all.
I don’t mind long books. (Last year, I got sucked into an 800 page book that I couldn’t put down.) But this one dragged a bit. I even put it down halfway through, read a couple more books, and then came back to finish this one over a couple of days. I will say, the second half did move a lot faster than the first half. But, there were a lot of twists, some of which just kept spiraling in a people spying on people spying on people spying way.
I also really didn’t understand the characters’ choices. Because Anna loves one man – even when he so obviously is just using and manipulating her – at his request, she ends up with a completely different man and even has children with him. And then she leaves raising her children to the nanny – who also has her own (random?) secrets – because she knows that she’s going to have to leave at some point and won’t be able to take her children. And the whole time, Anna has no idea who she is actually working for! What?! Why would she (potentially literally) sacrifice her entire life for some invisible, unknown entity, all because of what basically amounts to unrequited love? At some point, I really wanted her to wise up and make a change, so I was very disappointed. At the same time, the author definitely committed to the character’s behavior and was very consistent throughout, so the author at least developed and stuck to a plan.
And then the end of the book. Or, maybe I should say, the lack of end of the book. It ends on a cliffhanger, we don’t find out what actually happens, and we’re left to guess at what might come next. Unfortunately, I’m not sure we’re going to ever know for sure. Doing some online digging, it looks like there might be a book with some character overlap coming out in 2021, but from the synopsis, it looks like it might be a prequel to this one, so I don’t know that we’ll get any answers to where we were left with this one.
Not a bad read, but the disappointing ending makes it hard to wholeheartedly recommend this one.
Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley and Harper 360/The Borough Press in exchange for my honest review. It has not influenced my opinion.