Violet Clouds

Disclaimer: I read this book as an advance copy from Netgalley. My thanks go to them, Random House UK, Ebury Press and to the author, Riley Sager, for this opportunity. The opinions stated in the review are my own.  This is one of the best thrillers I've read! The book has wonderfully complex characters as well as a compulsive reading plot. The author takes the movie trope of a Final Girl, the lone survivor of a terrible event, and makes her the focus of this book. Quincy is already dealing with the aftermath of a massacre that killed her friends some years ago when a new threat is found at her door. The book starts slowly, giving the reader time to allow musing on the different ways of handling trauma and grief. The pressure builds to revelations that pull you down a rabbit hole of theories and red herrings. The protagonist was very interesting to watch as she works to unwind the memories she hasn't been able to access since that  terrible day and tries to handle t...

Disclaimer: I read this book as an advance copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks go to them, to Hodder & Stoughton and to the author for this opportunity. The opinions stated in this review are my own. "Roanoke girls never last long around here. In the end, we either run or we die". There is a creeping dread woven into this book. The fate of the Roanoke girls is something that is there in the background at first but then the secret is given voice quite early in the book. The insidiousness of the full truth, however, takes the whole of the text to unfold. Lane Roanoke grew up far away from the house of her grandparents, taken off to New York by her mother. At sixteen, following her mother's suicide, she found herself back there for a summer. This intertwines with Lane returning many years later, alarmed by the disappearance of her cousin, Allegra. The subject matter Engel writes about is uncomfortable reading and this bo...