They say you killed…But What If They’re Wrong?

Sixty seconds after she wakes from a coma, Maggie’s world is torn apart

The police tell her that her daughter Elspeth is dead. That she drowned when the car Maggie had been driving plunged into the river. Maggie remembers nothing.

When Maggie begs to see her husband Sean, the police tell her that he has disappeared. He was last seen on the day of her daughter’s funeral.

What really happened that day at the river?
Where is Maggie’s husband?
And why can’t she shake the suspicion that somewhere, somehow, her daughter is still alive?

I received a free copy of this book courtesy of the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

What could be worse than waking from a medically-induced coma? Discovering your daughter died in the accident that put you there and that your husband has left. And to cap it off, you have absolutely no memory of the incident that led to such a tragic incident. This is the situation Maggie Allan finds herself in. No daughter. No husband. A missed funeral. No memory.

On a long, slow road to physical recovery, not to mention mental recovery. As she tries to piece her life back together the briefest fragments of that night return to her. She also begins to uncover things. Troubling things. People believe she was responsible for the accident, that she was ultimately responsible for her own daughter’s death. Her troubled past comes back to haunt her and entangles itself within her present and future leading to a trail of broken lives and traumatic histories. But what actually happened on that night?

I found this book to have all of the elements to make an entertaining mystery. There was a story waiting to be told and a mystery to be uncovered. Throw in troubled youth and a strained relationship and the concept is there. Overall, the premise is good, but some elements were tough to enjoy for me. The arrival of a new character seems remarkably coincidental. So much so it became agonisingly clear this character was involved in the mystery. Though the nature of their involvement wasn’t completely clear, all sense of mystery evaporated as there was no doubt that they had more than an incidental role to play.

While this book offered a lot of elements that make for an entertaining mystery, revealed in little tidbits, one element at a time, the obvious introduction of an otherwise inconsequential character really broke my immersion. The first half of the book is solid and pacey, but as it progresses into its second half, it starts to lose me. The ending has elements of predictability, while also managing to feel overboard, and somewhat hard to swallow.

My rating: