Before We Met by Lucie Whitehouse
My rating: 3/5 cats
so i’m kind of loving on all these british psychological suspense thrillers. even though they don’t really stay with me for very long, i just really enjoy the journey.
i loved the first lucie whitehouse book i read, The House at Midnight, which was a kind of riff on The Secret History. if anything, this one is a kinda sorta spin on Gone Girl in that it exposes the secrets a marriage holds, and reminds us how difficult it is to ever really know someone, especially when it concerns the lives our beloveds live before they meet us.
hannah and mark had something of a whirlwind romance, and have been married for eight months. before mark, hannah had been living a life full of casual relationships, having seen the hysterical mess her mother had become when she suspected her husband of infidelity, and vowing that she would never find herself in a similar situation. hannah reasoned that the best way to avoid becoming that woman was to remain emotionally uninvolved, and she had—focusing on her career and enjoying a series of one-night stands while retaining her autonomy.
and then she met mark.
mark seems to be the perfect man—he is english, like herself, very loving and very successful while still remaining down-to-earth and not consumed by material gain. for him, she gives up her vow, leaves her own successful career in new york to marry him, and moves back to london. everything appears to be going perfectly, until the night she finds herself at an arrivals gate at heathrow to meet him after one of his business trips, and he isn’t there. she isn’t able to reach him on his phone or through email, and she suddenly finds herself behaving exactly like her mother—searching for clues about what could have happened to him, and not liking at all what she finds.
what follows is a series of revelations and unexpected ripples in the happiness she thought they shared, and as the synopsis says, she must decide whether the secrets Mark has been keeping are designed to protect him or protect her.
i loved the journey of this book, but i was kind of unwowed by the ending. it’s not a cheat of an ending, not really, but it does poke a few of my readerly raw nerves that i cannot go into in any detail here, as they would be totally spoilery. but it involves character and consistency and liberties that work in a book but would not play in the real world. but this is a book, so what’s my problem?
nothing at all. it’s definitely a good read, if you don’t stop and question too much and just enjoy the book like a regular person would and get over your damn self, karen, you will have a wonderful time with it.
read my book reviews on goodreads
