Seeing as I enjoyed this authors other books so much, choosing to read this book was a no brainer for me. In my view this is not Frieda’s best work, but I’m still quite the Frieda McFadden fan!
The story begins with protagonist Tess waking up with a headache and stumbling into her bathroom and it looking way different to how she remembered it, and she looks much older in the mirror than she ought to. Then she returns to her bedroom to find that in place of her fiancé, there’s a stranger.
As the story moves on this “stranger” tells her that he is her husband and that she has significant memory problems since a car accident a year ago.
And at first this makes sense. Tess asks her stranger/husband, Graham, some questions and tries to reorient her way around her house. At this point she discovers that she’s locked in.
Shortly after her carer appears and Tess learns that Graham is her legal guardian and is basically in charge of her.
Then Tess gets an anonymous text message telling her not to trust her husband Graham.
Tess tries to make a getaway to meet with the mysterious messenger but fails.
That evening Tess believes Graham is drugging her, and makes a note of it on her body, where Graham won’t see it to remind her in the morning.
Day 2 comes around and Tess has no memory of the day before, and is just as shocked at her surroundings and circumstances as she was the day previous.
But she does see the message she left for herself, and calls 911 at her earliest opportunity.
However, when a cop turns up at the door, they get turned away. Graham is Tess’s legal guardian after all, and Tess is left apologising.
And there are other strange things, too. Tess occasionally has flashes of memories that contradict the things that Graham has been telling her, such as how they met.
The story goes on in much the same way until Tess’s father shows up at the door and a twist is revealed that I never saw coming. And shortly after that twist is another one!
I liked the ending, and how it wrapped everything up at the end.
The book did put me in mind of another bestselling book by S J Watson, called Before I Go To Sleep, which is also a psychological thriller where the protagonist loses her memory every time she goes to sleep. In my view, Watson’s was the best book of the two, it’s more of a page turner, and was even made into a film starring Nicole Kidman.
As I mentioned earlier, this isn’t Frieda McFaddon’s best work in my view, so if you want to read books by this either to see what all the hype is about, I would recommend that you start with one of the other ones such as The Housemaid, or The Inmate.
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