My love for books comes in different shades and from different locations. Bookshops are usually the perfect setting for starting a new life or a new love - or both - but this time, the action of a psychological thriller was set in a bookshop. A very first for me.
Valerie Keogh is a regular author featured on my blog, and each time the topics and settings are different, however, each book offers through the main woman character a different psychological depths.
After killing her partner in an apparent self-defense act against constant abuse, Helen Appleby is freed two years into her 4-year prison term. She is decided to close a chapter in her life and start anew, opening her very own bookshop. Her future may look bright but is her past really out of her life for good?
The story sets slowly, and although from the very beginning we are offered some hints about the psychological background and traumatic upbringing of the main character, there is nothing that may prepare us for the denoument and the page-turning set of events.
The dark mood taking slowly control of the story is also generated by the moral confusion that the reader may deal with: particularly in relationship with taking one´s life. Indeed, the trauma is unbereable and the abuse may push anyone into the darker corners of the mind, but is there no other escape than inflicting an even bigger trauma to get freed?
The author spares no details that may on one hand relate the experience of the places described, and on the other hand on the changing sands of Helen´s mood. Permanently doubting herself and assuming hidden intentions to the others, she may naively be caught up in a net of misplaced trust that in the end however will operate in her interest.
Helen, always late to make that call, a victim of her father´s abuse, may even violently wish to have a normal life. First though, she may allow her to get cured by all those small lies, perhaps remnants of a self-defence mechanism she acquired in her childhood. However, although we know a lot of Helen and her psychological torments, it is very difficult to imagine her in flesh and body, which is a relative shortcoming of the book for me.
Constantly, the relationship of the characters with books, that may go beyond the expected hope that books will open the gates to a completely new better world, also puts into question the reasons - wrong or not - we may clinch so much to books.
I enjoyed both the story and the thoughts in generated and I cannot wait to see how this author will surprise us in her next book.
Rating: 3.5 stars
Disclaimer: Book offered as part of the book tour but the opinions are, as usual, my own
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