Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris
My rating: 3/5 cats
women’s health calls this book “2016’s ANSWER TO GONE GIRL”
dear women’s health – please leave the readers’ advisory work to trained professionals and stick to telling us how much water we should be drinking. for our vaginas.
this is nothing like Gone Girl. it’s nothing like The Girl on the Train. i’m not even sure this can be classified as psychological suspense, really. this is a straight-up thriller. and there ain’t a thing in the world wrong with that, except when people like women’s health start getting a little loosey goosey with their suggestions and ruining the reputation of readers’ advisory for everybody.
ice cream is good. cheese is good. both are dairy products. but telling someone, “oh, you like ice cream?? here, have some cheese!” is setting up an expectation that can at best end in confusion but more likely to result in resentment and murder.
and as much as i hate to use this review space to rant about something only tangentially related to the book, these things matter to me. plus, this is one of those books where i can already hear the shrieking of the people about how all of the spoilers in the world are being spoiled by me so it’s probably best for me to do this instead.
i am absolutely fine with calling this a marriage thriller or a psychological thriller, but the word “suspense” and the wrong readalikes set up certain expectations that will be unmet by this book.
the focus of this book is the “perfect” marriage of jack and grace angel: he is a handsome lawyer specializing in domestic abuse who has never lost a case while she is beautiful and demure, retired from her high-powered career to transfer her accomplishments to the realm of the domestic arts: soufflé baking, painting, gardening, and entertaining; awaiting the day her special needs sister millie will turn eighteen, leave her boarding school, and come to live with them in their perfect house and be a part of their perfect life.
and that would be a terribly boring book without some conflict lurking underneath. the synopsis up there pretty much tells you all you need to know about what’s really going on, but i’ll repost it here in spoiler tags just in case:
View Spoiler »so, you’re a smart kid – you can do the math on that and figure out what’s what.
(and, okay, so it’s a little bit like Gone Girl, but only the View Spoiler » parts.
psychological suspense novels like Gone Girl are characterized by the destabilizing effect they have on their reader; where tension is built and maintained through misdirection and the manipulation of narrative twists, keeping the reader guessing, uncertain about what’s actually going on, where the story is headed, if the narrator can be trusted.
the appeal of this book doesn’t lie in its suspense at all, but in its action. after the initial discovery; once you know what you know (it’s a relatively early reveal but i’ll continue to play coy), the plot doesn’t deviate from that scenario. this book is about this one thing and everything that logically follows that one thing. the fun of this book is not in figuring anything out, but in watching it unfold in its absolutely relentless pacing; one of those white-knuckle, edge of your seat reads where the story is broken up between the past and the present, as the time between those two periods narrows, bringing the two stories together for the dramatic explosion.
it’s the literary parallel of the lifetime movie. in which assessment there is no pejorative value judgment implied – it is a marriage thriller, after all.
my only quibble is View Spoiler »
not terrifically realistic, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a lot of fun. but it also doesn’t mean it’s anything like Gone Girl. at all.
3.5 stars cats from me. and also this one.
