Author: Lisa Jewell
Year published: 2023
Category: Adult fiction (thriller/mystery)
Pages: 384 pages
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Location: (my 2024 Google Reading map): UK
Summary: Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summer crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins.
A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix’s children’s school. Josie has been listening to Alix’s podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life.
Josie’s life appears to be strange and complicated, and although Alix finds her unsettling, she can’t quite resist the temptation to keep making the podcast. Slowly she starts to realize that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it, Josie has inveigled her way into Alix’s life—and into her home.
But, as quickly as she arrived, Josie disappears. Only then does Alix discover that Josie has left a terrible and terrifying legacy in her wake, and that Alix has become the subject of her own true crime podcast, with her life and her family’s lives under mortal threat.
Who is Josie Fair? And what has she done?
Review: I figured I can always count on a Lisa Jewell mystery/thriller and I wasn't wrong. This thriller has unreliable narrators (of the good kind), twists and turns, and creepiness.
Jewell did a great job up to the very last page of keeping the reader not completely sure of who is telling the truth (note the title). I sympathized with each character along the way as more was revealed, but I also lost faith in them, too. What a clever combination!
I read this book in two days, getting sucked into the web of lies, revelations, and more. The format of a podcast host interviewing people who were involved and the Netflix documentary about the podcast was a format that worked for me as well.
Challenges for which this counts:
- Alphabet (Title)--N
- Cloak and Dagger
No comments
Post a Comment