Hardcover: 414 Pages

Publisher: Lake Union Publishing (February 2, 2021)

When Tara Peary’s twin sister Sophie goes missing, Tara dives into New York’s underbelly to find her. Sophie is the one person who’s ever truly understood her, and Tara knows her sister isn’t the only one who needs help.

Tara is also on the run emotionally from her complicated childhood. Her memories are threatening to overwhelm her emotions and derail the hunt for Sophie. A psychotherapist keeps her afloat, but when Tara begins dating her therapist’s young tech-millionaire neighbor, she risks losing the only lifelines she has left.

The more Tara uncovers about her sister’s disappearance and the dark side of the rich elite, the less certain of the truth she becomes. As Tara reaches the center of the mystery, spanning from her childhood home in Georgia to a Southern California beach, she has to decide whether the truth is a price she’s willing to pay.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

I don’t seem to work and play well with others. Stupidity gets on my nerves.

 

Seasons change, but not in Hollywood. It’s as if time didn’t move on there, and all the plastic surgery was a desperate attempt to make sure it remained that way.

 

Maybe to distinguish herself from other evangelists, she made exorcisms her specialty… Whether the exorcisms worked, I couldn’t say. But they did appear to, which, in religion, is the same thing.

 

I am like nested Russian dolls, she thinks, each part of me inside the other, going deeper and deeper, darker and darker. Tara shivers then, and she knows the meaning of someone walking on her grave.

My Review:

 

This was an intense and challenging read, which was evidenced in the fact that it took me three times longer to read it than any other book of the same length as I needed to periodically put my Kindle down and seek out a pleasant distraction. The storylines were throbbing with tension, angst, conflict, and inner turmoil; yet written with incredible insight and painful awareness.

I was intrigued and repelled Tara’s disturbing family history as her parents were odious. Her zealot mother was the worst type of loathsome hypocrite; I despised her before I even knew the half of it. All the characters, even the secondary ones, were complicated, dark, and deeply twisted, yet so compellingly written they viciously stabbed at my curiosity. Very few were even likable beings with the dog Hickory being the only one that truly was, and he didn’t fare so well.

I learned two new words and phrases used by Tara’s evangelical faith healer mother to describe myself, I am “resolutely apostate” and apparently have a “Jezebel spirit.” Amen!

About Leslie Archer

Leslie Archer is the nom de plume of a New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty-five novels.

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