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Thank you to NetGalley and Harlequin Trade Publishing for allowing me to read this ARC!
Content Warning: death, murder, violence, sexual assault, rape, abduction, child abuse, miscarriage.
Wylie Lark spends her life researching and writing novels about true crime. After a bad fight with her ex-husband and her son, Wylie decides to go to a little town in Iowa as she starts to work on her newest book. It's the story of a little girl called Josie Doyle, the sole survivor of a night of terror that left her family dead and her best friend presumably abducted, and Wylie is staying in the very house where it happened. As a massive winter storm begins to rage across the county, Wylie discovers something shocking: a child, freezing in the snow. The child won't speak to her, but something is clearly wrong -- and it isn't long before Wylie realizes that they are not the only ones caught in this snowstorm...
What a ride! Intensely atmospheric, this thriller is the kind of edge-of-your-seat reading that always brightens up my day. Flashing back between Wylie in the present day and the murders of the Doyle family in the early 2000s', with an additional POV that tells us about the life of the child Wylie has stumbled upon, there isn't a dull moment. It's hard to put down, particularly as it feels as if each chapter is inching closer and closer to the truth of what happened and is happening. I'd previously read one of Gudenkauf's novels many years ago, and I'm happy to report that this one is just as good as the one I enjoyed so long ago!
In the beginning I wasn't too sure I liked Wylie, per se, but I definitely found her intriguing, and the longer we spent in her head, the more I warmed to her. She's tough and practical, impatient and a little reticent, but beneath it all she has a soft heart. It was actually refreshing that she wasn't some perfectly likable heroine, and I completely adore female characters that are allowed to be flawed, mercurial and human.
The mystery is suspenseful, and one of the things I absolutely must praise Gudenkauf for is the pacing. I mentioned above that each chapter brings us closer to unraveling the mystery, and there's never a moment where I found myself wondering when we would get back to the meat of the narrative, or felt as if we were meandering unnecessarily. Wylie is the character most strongly drawn, and the rest of the cast does feel a bit simple, but it is (primarily) Wylie's story, and I didn't mind the close focus on her and her life.
The writing itself didn't make much of an impression on me either way; it wasn't exactly my preferred style, perhaps a touch too simplistic, and that's one of the reasons it wasn't a full five stars for me -- but that's entirely subjective, and I think many other people won't have any issue with it at all. It did the job of telling us the story, though, and I suppose that's the most important part! The mystery itself wasn't all that difficult for me to solve, and I didn't find the twists too shocking, but I'm a tried-and-true thriller reader, so take that with a grain of salt.
All in all, I highly recommend this for thriller lovers, and I think the chilling mystery combined with the chilling atmosphere is a sure winner!
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