Secrets and murder at the Sycamores
This psychological thriller is told from the viewpoints of two very different women, both basically at the dead-end run-down motel turned apartment complex because of events over which they had no control.
Cass is the motel manager, dumped by a rich boyfriend who refused to marry her and then took up with a much younger woman. She happens to be very handy and so has the very depressing job of fixing up the dilapidated units for low wages and the place she gets to live in. She knows almost everything going on in those apartments behind closed doors.
Anna was married to Henry, an artist who had a unit at the Sycamores to use as a studio. She comes to clear out the place he'd used and to get answers after he kills himself following a phone call to her when he confessed to some terrible crime.
Daily life at the Sycamores is no treat, but there are the pool women, the kids, the other odd tenants, and one very bad man. Someone there, however, knows what happened to Henry and soon Anna finds evidence that she had no idea what Henry had actually been doing in this place.
I was fully invested and really absorbed in this story until everything suddenly shifted and went off the rails. The revelations, the climax, and the resolution took this down several notches. Basically, this was a female empowerment trope with a bunch of bad men all around. It didn't ring true, and I found it all wildly unlikely. Also, the characters just did not feel believable, and I didn't like them, what they did, or how it all ended.
I listened to the audiobook with its two different narrators and preferred the voice of the woman who performed Cass to the one who did Anna. I always feel that listening while following along in the e-book ARC (provided by the publisher) gives me much more entertainment. I was just disappointed in the last third of the story.
This is a standalone and is not part of any series.
Genre - psychological thriller
No comments:
Post a Comment