THE MISSING WIFE by Sam Carrington | Blog Tour Review #TheMissingWife

Published by Avon
Available in ebook and paperback (27 June 2019)
352 pages
Source: Copy received from publisher for review

ABOUT THE BOOK

You think you know those closest to you. You are wrong…

A sleep-deprived new mother approaching her fortieth birthday, the very last thing Louisa wants to do is celebrate.

But when her friend Tiff organises a surprise party, inviting the entire list of Louisa’s Facebook friends, Louisa is faced with a room full of people she hasn’t spoken to in years – including someone she never expected to see again: her ex-boyfriend, Oliver Dunmore.

When Oliver’s wife Melissa goes missing after the party, everyone remembers the night differently. Someone knows what happened to Melissa, and Louisa is determined to find them. But the truth could be closer, and the deception more devastating, than she’d ever imagined…

A gripping psychological suspense novel, perfect for fans of Samantha Downing’s My Lovely Wife, Lucy Clarke’s You Let Me In and Linda Green’s The Last Thing She Told Me.

MY THOUGHTS

My thanks to Sabah and Avon for the blog tour invite and for providing the copy for review.

New mum Louisa is exhausted so when she finds out that a surprise 40^th birthday party has been arranged for her from her Facebook friends list it’s the last thing she wants. Especially when she discovers that an old boyfriend from her university days, Oliver, has been invited – and has accepted.

She hasn’t seen Oliver for over 20 years and they didn’t part on the best of terms but he is married now; Louisa is married with a family of her own, surely it can’t hurt to speak to him again just for one evening. However when Oliver’s wife then goes missing after the party, Louisa finds herself dragged into past events that she has tried her hardest to forget.

This was such a suspenseful read and I had no idea which way it was going. I don’t have children so I can’t relate to the exhaustion of a new baby but I certainly felt every minute of Louisa’s brain fogged days when she just closed her eyes for a moment and woke up several hours later. It became more worrying when she couldn’t remember if she had fed the baby and especially so when she felt that her husband and best friend were undermining her and casting doubt on her ability to care for herself and baby Noah.

Because of her memory lapses and sleep deprivation, Louisa is an extremely unreliable narrator. There was clearly some devastating event from her past that she couldn’t remember and Oliver’s reappearance in her life clearly had some connection to this, but what? The huge gaps in her memory from the past, together with the alcohol induced haze from the night of her party mean that Louisa has about as much idea as the reader of what is happening. This was one of those stories where I didn’t trust anyone – I felt that everyone had something to hide and were at various times acting very suspiciously – and if you add in the little areas of misdirection and being led up the wrong path a few times, it’s no wonder my poor brain was spinning.

With the exception of perhaps Louisa who I thought rather naïve and quite often unwise in some of her decisions, none of the characters were that likeable – Oliver had all the charm of a second hand car salesman (in my experience of course, I can’t speak for all!) – definitely a bit smarmy, verging on creepy, and someone who would score very low on my trust rating; and as for Louisa’s best friend Tiff, something wasn’t quite right there either. My suspicions as to what was really happening and who was responsible were constantly changing, right up until the end.

I have bought the author’s previous books, but this is the first that I’ve read. I really enjoyed it and shall be hunting out the others from the bookshelves.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sam Carrington lives in Devon with her husband, two border terriers and a cat. She has three adult children and a new grandson! She worked for the NHS for fifteen years, during which time she qualified as a nurse. Following the completion of a psychology degree she went to work for the prison service as an Offending Behaviour Programme Facilitator. Her experiences within this field inspired her writing. She left the service to spend time with her family and to follow her dream of being a novelist. SAVING SOPHIE, her debut psychological thriller, published in September 2016. It became a Kindle eBook bestseller, with the paperback hitting The Bookseller Heatseeker chart at #8. Sam was named an Amazon Rising Star of 2016. Her second psychological thriller, BAD SISTER, published in 2017 followed by ONE LITTLE LIE in July 2018. THE MISSING WIFE publishes in June 2019 with her fifth due on 12th December.