This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Reviewed by Jennifer Joyce
Ellie and her husband Max have worked hard to transform their once unloved farmhouse into a beautiful, modern home for themselves and their five year old twins. Ellie is pleased with the results, but her sister Leo isn’t so sure. The house is lovely but, as the place Ellie and Leo grew up in, it holds many bad memories and Leo isn’t sure a new fitted kitchen and a lick of paint will erase them.
However, Leo is willing to give the house a chance and so she comes to stay for a few days. On the evening of her arrival, a teenage girl is abducted and, during her bid to escape, is knocked down by a car on what the local villagers refer to as the back road. Instead of helping the girl, the driver drags her to the side of the road and leaves her. The police suspect the culprit was someone from the village, but with everybody acting suspicious, finding out who isn’t going to be easy.
There are questions to be asked from the very beginning of The Back Road. In the prologue, there are two young girls locked in a cupboard by The Mother, but we don’t yet know who these people are. The prologue is quite chilling and full of intrigue and it really sets the tone for the entire book as we try to figure out who abducted the teenage girl and who knocked her over and left her for dead. These aren’t the only mysteries within the book though, as Ellie is being stalked and blackmailed by an obsessed man who is always watching her and leaving yellow roses. Ellie knows who this man is, however the reader is left guessing. Then there is the secret surrounding Ellie’s friend, Fiona who left the village under suspicious circumstances, but has recently returned.
I had many suspicions throughout reading The Back Road and there are so many twists and turns that I was still changing my mind and suspecting somebody else until the end. I think I’d pointed the finger at everyone by the time I finished! I found the book to be very well-written, with suspense and intrigue woven throughout, making me believe I had a vague notion of what was happening before turning everything on its head again. I was hooked, desperate to keep reading to find out how it would all end and who was responsible. The book gripped from the beginning and kept its hold on me for every page after.
9/10
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