Stillhouse Lake

“But I've kept them safe from the wolves, at least: the most basic and important job of a parent, to keep her offspring from being eaten by predators. Even the ones I can't see.”

Someone said this this was very gory but this makes me confused. Have we read the same book? Yes, the book has been unsettling here and there but, overall, it felt like like your average episode of Criminal Minds, The Following or The Mentalist (minus the humor). These shows, mostly the first two, deal with horrendous stuff done by deranged people but are they gory though? I don't think so. They're just glamorized sneak peaks into this thing that fascinates most of us How do sickos think? What do sickos do? What would we do if we ever had to deal with one of them? And I'm not saying there's something wrong with watching these, as I have obviously done so in the past, I'm just saying, at least for me, I didn't feel the writing was skilled enough to get me to feel dread. The only moments where I flinched were when the main character would read the vicious internet trolls' comments, those kind of comments that you can only find in the pits of the Internet and human rot. Those did make me sick to my stomach. But other than that, this thriller was pretty vanilla.

The first few pages peaked my interest but then for more of 50% of the book, these eye-roll worthy moments kept coming up. I didn't find the characters very convincing, especially Gwen. She just happens to:
-become a ninja with crazy gun skills overnight;
- stumble upon a load of cash from her ex that allows her to keep changing identities and locations
- be able to work as a freelancer online after 10 years of PTAs and cooking and cleaning for the family;

Then we have her inner dialogue, so, so cringey at times. She blurts out little jems like:

“I can see the difference in the way that Sam talks to the kids, in the way he makes mistakes and corrects them, says goofy things and smart things, and is a real, natural human.”“As much as I watch Sam, I don't see any of that. I only see a person. A real person.

She thinks she knows Sam after having met him two days prior, “She” being the same woman who didn't realize her husband (who made her choke on a coin while having sex) was a serial killer, but yeah, NOW she sees people, NOW she KNOWS.

“Sam says, “You don't say much about Connor's dad.”I haven't said anything, in fact. I can't. I won't. So instead, I say, “Nothing much to say. Connor needed someone to look up to. You gave him that, Sam.”

She's only known him for like a week. What the...?


“Next, everything but my clothes is taken and stored in a guard station, and then I'm strip-searched; it's a humiliating, invasive process, but I grit my teeth and get through it without complaint. This is important, I think. Mel likes to play chess. This move, this visit, is my checkmate. I can't afford to flinch at the cost of making it.”

Yeah, she's the reincarnation of Sherlock. A very whinny reincarnation of Sherlock. Guards do strip-searches at high-security prisons. Imagine that!

“It's an hour before a guard appears to summon me on—he's young and hard-faced, this one, with sharply clinical eyes. African American. A bodybuilder, I think. Nobody I'd want to cross.”

Yes, cause all black men are scary, you wouldn't want to cross them, no sir.

“I walk instead. Slowly. Calmly.Because fuck him.”

Yes, she's talking about her serial killer ex. She though she would go and threaten him and he would react something in the likes of “You've convinced me, I will leave you alone!”. Him being the kind of human dejection that cuts a person to pieces and gets a stiffie from watching them rot.

“My chess move didn't work with my murdering ex-husband.”

Jee, ya think?

But for last 30% of the book the pacing picked up and we got a lot of action. It made me forget the bore of the first part and I settled on 3 stars (more like 2.5) purely for the entertainment factor.