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She wasn't, though. I asked her if she meant her fairy statues, but she was adamant they were babies.' Hannah Hall has married Owen, a man that walked into her 'woodturning" shop and swept her off her feet despite her resistance, due to having just broken up with her fiancée. Owen's sixteen year old daughter, Bailey, despises everything about Hannah but Hannah is determined to win her over someday. Life is good for Hannah, she loves her work, she loves both Owen and Bailey, she finally has a family after suffering for decades over feelings of abandonment because her parents left her when she was young. Overall, this book did indeed live up to the hype. As 2022, with one or two notable exceptions, has mainly served up stale, lukewarm offerings in the thriller category, thus far, I was relieved to discover I had an ace in the hole with this one. Highly recommend!! Following the success of my first two novels I got another two-book deal from Headline Review, with Things I Wish I'd Known being the first of these. I am currently working on my fourth novel. Special thanks to NetGalley and Simon&Schuster for sharing this amazing digital reviewer copy with me in exchange my honest thoughts.
The majority of the novel is Hannah looking for the truth, finding it, and making a deal that will affect the rest of her life. Grady, the US Marshall is completely against the idea. “You can’t trust him. It’s crazy for you to think you can. You can not make a deal with the devil and expert it to turn out okay.” I turn away from him, look out the window. “Except I just did”.I didn't love it. At ALL. But I also wonder if I would have enjoyed the book as much without it. In fact, much of the book's power for me resided in the final "epilogue" scene, which wouldn't have been possible without the ending it had. So...definitely a conundrum. Very bittersweet, I guess.
Moments before she died, Nicola's grandmother whispers to her a long kept secret. Nichola's mother claims she was talking nonsense. But which one is telling the truth? Hannah’s husband Owen disappears amidst a scandal at his job, and he leaves behind a note that simply says “Protect her.” This note refers to his 16 year old daughter, Bailey. Hannah then spends the entire book on a fact finding mission to determine what happened, and uncovers secrets about his past. Secrets that, in my opinion, weren’t all that interesting. Along the way, she is rude and dismissive to multiple people that have the nerve to try and help her.My first thoughts on this book as I was finishing it were that this was a very slowly paced novel. This is definitely not a thriller as I would define it. I never had that taut, scary feeling that something was going to happen that was terrible, horrible, world changing. There was suspense but it was not that chilling feeling I was expecting. Rather than waiting to see how things unfold, Hannah takes action. Based on a picture and very unreliable memories from when Bailey was less than 4 years old, they are off to a distant city to try to find out Owen's true identity. Is Owen who he says he is and if he's not, what does that mean for Hannah and even more so, for Bailey, his daughter? It's hard to imagine that I would make the choices that Hannah and Bailey make throughout the book but the good thing that comes out of all of this is that they both realize that they have each other through whatever is going on in their lives. Garner stars as Hannah, whose picture-perfect marriage to Owen (“Game of Thrones’” Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is suddenly undone by a doozy of a secret, as her hubby suddenly chooses to disappear when his company comes under investigation. She were probably thinking about angels. She used to believe in angels, you know. She told me once her angels would be waiting for her at the end.' A chiller with a puzzling mystery that manages to be a tearjerker too. Prepare for sleepless nights' Grazia
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