I am here with another review today, Twisted by Hannah Jayne. Thanks so much to NetGalley for sending me an eARC of this book for an honest review. As always, all opinions are my own.
Starting off this book, I was excited, but a little bit nervous. I've been reading a lot of thrillers lately, and they've all been wonderful, but I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop. It wasn't just this book, it's been the last couple thrillers I read. But I was just hoping that it was going to be great, and I have to say, this book did not disappoint!
The story follows Bex Andrews, AKA Beth Anne Reimer, AKA "The Wife Collector's Daughter." After her grandmother dies, Beth Anne changes her name to Bex and is sent to live with foster parents, because her biological mother has been missing since Bex was six years old, and is presumed dead, and well, her dad is kind of on the run after being accused of being a serial killer who's signature is leaving the bodies in dumpsters and cutting off the left ring fingers. EEP! Talk about less than stellar parents.
Anyways, Bex starts her new life in Kill Devil Hills with her new parents, Denise and Michael. I really loved the way their relationship started off, a really positive experience in the face of so many bad foster and adoptive stories. Things went down hill, but I'll get to that later.
So Bex is settling in, she meets a cute boy, her foster parents are great, she gets some really amazing friends right away, but she just can't shake the feeling that something isn't right. She starts getting mysterious calls from her old city, she feels like she's being followed, and she is so paranoid that her father or something worse is trying to get her, she can't talk about any of this with anyone. Her first boyfriend will surely run for the hills when he finds out about Bex's past, and her foster parents are oblivious to their new daughter's biological father, other than that they heard of him back in the day when they lived in Raleigh, where everything started.
One thing the author did really well was building suspense and making you feel like you were in the moment with Bex. She kept having flashbacks in the middle of a conversation with someone, and you could feel her anxiety and the tension in the room. When she was paranoid or scared, you could feel her terror. On top of all that, you felt pity for her because you knew that no matter if her father was innocent or guilty, she deserved a life where she didn't have to change her name for fear of rejection or even threats. Where she wasn't accused of being just like him, in online chat rooms, dedicated to "serial killer enthusiasts." There was just a lot of emotion within this book and the author did a great job of putting you in that emotion.
Neither the reader nor Bex really knows who "The Wife Collector" is, until the end of the book. There's definitely some speculation about others, not necessarily in Bex's mind, at this point her main suspect is her father, but she is more scared for herself, will she "catch" the psychopathy. But in my mind, I had a ton of different suspects. The detectives that first worked the case, somehow trying to cover up their own murders, of course, that it actually was the father, and at one point, I even had a theory that it was the adoptive parents, they lived in the same city when everything happened, and they couldn't have kids so they picked out Beth Anne as an easy target with no mother and an absent trucker father who would be better off in their home and framed Bex's dad while somehow orchestrating her adoption ten years later. It made more sense in my head...
There were, however, a few kinks in the story that lost some stars for me. Firstly, the whole adoptive parents not knowing who Bex was. I get that she has a right to her privacy, but I think the caseworker should have at least told them that her father was an, at that point presumed criminal. Not that Bex would be a criminal herself, but that she could get therapy or something and they would understand what was going on.
I also felt like the ending was a bit of a let down. It may have just been that I was reading an eARC and couldn't really judge how far I was into the book, and how little there was left, but it felt a little too quick for me. It was pretty much a steady stream of paranoia, some action, major event and end, no questions asked. For the most part, things were tied up, we found out who The Wife Collector was, if Denise and Michael still wanted Bex as their daughter, etc. but it just felt too abrupt.
Overall, this was a good solid book, with some great bones, there were just a couple of issues I had with it.