Brooke Linford

We have an interesting storyline with a woman who thinks she might be stalked by a strange man, is suffering from severe PTSD due to a childhood trauma that was worsened thanks to a bad relationship, and is swimming in trust issues.

The writing moves fairly quick and the chapters are small so you can blow through this book in 1-2 hours especially once the action picks up towards the end.

Her characters feel realistic and their behavior for the most part makes sense except for the PTSD that Amanda is suffering from. Apparently when she was a kid she didn’t like the water, as in the ocean not the drink, then she saw a kid drown and developed a phobia from that. It doesn’t say that she saw this happening and there’s no intimate connection to the kid implied. The combination of her already unexplained and illogical fear of the ocean with this drowning she had no connection to became something that followed her into adulthood to the point she refused to get on boats and would have near panic attacks near water. The breaking point was when her fiancée threw her in the water with the alleged intent to drown her out of anger for breaking their engagement. Now that last part I could definitely see being something that would cause trauma but the lead up didn’t have the same sense of believability to it at least not to cause the extreme PTSD that is implied.

It wasn’t a bad book but for me it didn’t have that same level of spine tingling suspense I was hoping for considering all the rave reviews and build up. It could be that since I didn’t like the lead character and thought she was an irritating, whiny child I had trouble caring whether she would end up dead or not. It didn’t help that it was also being billed as a ‘Romance’ because there really wasn’t much to that unless you count the blink & you’ll miss it scene of Amanda and Lucas finally “getting over their trust issue” in the biblical way – cue eye roll. Like I said she just irritated me.… (mehr)