This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Reviewed by Susan Lobban
Pls call. I need to talk to you.
Liv has her mind on other things and doesn’t have time to text her best friend Julia back. She will call her back later. Liv can’t understand why Julia would be disturbing her on the night she has to come face-to-face with her husband’s ex-mistress anyway. The next day, Liv and her kids are looking forward to a lovely Sunday lunch at Julia’s where the best friends can have a catch up. However, when their knocks go unanswered, Liv feels a sense of dread immediately. Letting herself in, she finds Julia lying on her couch with only a bottle of Jack Daniels for company, not hungover, but dead! Liv refuses to believe that Julia took her own life and therefore sets out to prove that she was murdered. The more she digs into Julia’s life, the more she realizes she did not know her as well as she thought and she is left questioning who she can really trust.
Trust in Me is an examination of a friendship and highlights that we never really know anybody as well as we think. We never meet Julia and at the start we only have Liv’s biased opinion of her (she believes Julia can do no wrong), but to be honest, from what I heard of Julia, I did not warm to her. It sounded like Julia was living the life Liv missed. Liv’s husband, Will, had an affair six years ago and they have stayed together, but this seems a strange decision as she has let the betrayal chip away at her constantly ever since. So, when she has to go to one of Will’s work parties, she is braced for meeting the other woman and does not have the time or energy to speak to Julia when she texts. When Julia is found dead the next day, it adds to her existing woes and she must shoulder the guilt of not being there for her best friend in her final hours.
Liv thinks she knew Julia inside out and refuses to believe she killed herself. She is determined to prove it so starts digging, but some things are best left buried. Her investigations start having unexpected implications on her own life. For someone with trust issues already, Liv begins to doubt absolutely everyone around her, which starts to seep into her family life. For every secret she uncovers, it creates more mystery and Liv is unable to stop investigating until she gets to the bottom of it all.I was looking forward to reading this as I really enjoyed Close My Eyes.As much as I could not put this down, I wasn’t enthralled. Liv is thrown red herrings along the way, which began to bore me as there were too many and literally the only people she could trust throughout were her children! The parts where the killer describes his past kills were eerily intriguing and had me looking for little clues to his identity. The whodunnit element was well done in that I was convinced I knew who the killer was, but I was wrong. To be honest, I was not invested in any of the characters and simply wanted to find out whether Liv could trust at least one adult in her life.
7/10