214 Palmer Street by Karen McQuestion

 

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Mystery, Suspense, Psychological Thriller
Content: Strong Language

A house with a secret. A woman with nothing to lose.

When Maggie sees the beautiful Venetian blinds moving in the Caldwells’ front window, she freezes. Her favorite neighbours Cady and Josh are away, so who is in their house?

The pretty young woman who answers the door tells a convincing story. She’s Sarah. The house-sitter. Just here for a month. An old friend of Cady’s who needed a place to stay. She’s pleasant and warm, and Maggie wanders back to her house thinking she might have made a new friend. Yet she can’t help but wonder why Cady never mentioned Sarah.

What Maggie doesn’t know is that on the other side of the door, Sarah is starting to panic. No one was meant to see her at 214 Palmer Street…

An unputdownable psychological thriller from number one bestseller Karen McQuestion, which will make you question what secrets your own neighbors are hiding… For fans of The Girl on the Train, The Woman in the Window and Gone Girl.

I liked some things about this book and other things not so much. For me, it was compelling despite the fact that it was very predictable and I had it all figured out pretty early on. There were a few things that happened that were pretty hard to believe, and I thought it was obvious who the 'Her' chapters were about. From the beginning there were only two characters she could have been and it was pretty easy to rule one of them out as I read, so I don't know why the author bothered to hide this woman's identity during these chapters. 

One other issue I had with it, is that I thought from the description it would be from the woman Maggie's point of view, and that she would be trying to figure out who the person was that she saw in the house and why they were there. For some reason that seemed like a much more interesting way for the story to go, but Maggie is hardly in the book, and the book is from Sarah's point of view. This threw me off a little because it wasn't what I expected. 

I still liked this book despite it's flaws, probably because it was the type of book I was in the mood to read. and I'll probably try another book by this author.