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i wanted to be nice and give this book 2 stars but the more i think about it the more angry i am. this book gets SO much hype and this author is like the queen of thrillers currently. I had super high expectations and just liked absolutely nothing.

WARNING: SO MANY SPOILERS

The Ethan/EJ red herring:
the similarities drawn between them were RIDICULOUS. it was like the author was putting up neon signs pointing at Ethan to say “LOOK ITS EJ�� and the fact that nothing came of it feels like a cheap misdirection. They’re both into wines, he happens to pick the wine that EJ brought to the house, they’re blonde and short, they’re charming, they both have rich parents, Ethan’s parents died in an “accident��. Honestly Ethan also sounded like a giant walking red flag and Tricia literally pointed out multiple times that all her friends said he has red flags but we’re just supposed to see them live happily ever after and be okay with it??

The Blackmail:
yes, slashing someone’s tire is bad and illegal and she would’ve been punished for it. But blackmailing someone and forcing them to give you narcotics prescriptions AND eventually trying to sexually extort them is a much worse crime. Since she was secretly recording all her sessions (we’ll get to how i feel about that in a second) she would have ample evidence of the blackmail between that and the messages he sent her. If she had saved the pictures he took of her to her own phone she could’ve gone to the police and proved that he was stalking, blackmailing, and harassing her. She was a giant celebrity so she would’ve gotten off easy with her crime. There is no world in which that needed to escalate the way it did. one slashed tire is not going to ruin your career when you’re that rich and famous.

Does Freida know what a therapist does?
I’m no psychotherapist but even I could tell that the ethics and practices in this woman’s career were AWFUL. I saw a review mention that the reason therapists have to have physical case notes is so they can use them to bill insurance companies so that creates a giant logical hole. She speaks to her patients in such a weird way, especially the woman with schizophrenia. She spends the whole session telling her how she’s wrong and delusional, which is so unproductive. The thing that bothered me the most is how she spoke to a client IN PUBLIC and introduced her to Luke, which is the hugest breach of confidentiality and absolutely would never happen in real life.

What’s wrong with Adrienne Hale
i genuinely thought the twist was gonna be that Adrienne was still alive and that she would have some terrifying disorder and be the villain all along because this woman genuinely made no sense. She claims to be a genius amazing flawless psychiatrist but talks and acts like it’s her first day on the job. She’s rude to Gloria the receptionist for literally no reason, and she was never even slightly convincing in her feelings for Luke. she never acted like she cared about him in the slightest. also, slashing someones tires for stealing your parking spot? girl i know it’s annoying but we went immediately from Minor Inconvenience to Committing a Crime. she tried to defend herself but there was genuinely no excuse. overall it just seemed like she genuinely had no empathy or compassion for anyone in her life. also, if she suspected that tricia killed her friends, why would she just not do anything about it? she’s sitting in a room with a woman who has committed three murders and never once does she think “hmm i should talk to the police about that��

Police Incompetence:
speaking of the police, did they just never investigate anything ever? EJ and Ethan both murdered their parents and were subjected to absolutely no scrutiny or suspicion at any time. Tricia turns up at a hospital covered in the blood of her friends and no one bats an eye or suspects her for an instant. Dr. Hale disappears, but the police never search her home thoroughly enough to discover a secret room of cassette tapes (a whole ROOM) or a trapdoor under a couch? it wasn’t even hidden that well, you would literally just have to move the couch over. Given the stakes of the case, you would think they could take the time to slide the couch a few feet to the left and notice a trapdoor with a rotting corpse hidden in the floor. with this many people being murdered, it doesn’t make sense that the police would just be on their merry way not investigating any highly suspicious deaths.

the writing:
Someone PLEASE buy Freida McFadden a thesaurus. there would be pages where the same description would be used like 5 times and it was exhausting. Any thoughts Tricia had about her husband were written like a Wattpad story. If i had to see her think �� *swoon* I have the best hottest husband in the world�� one more time I was going to set the book on fire. She would bring up the same things over and over like she thought we forgot she was pregnant with Ethan’s baby. Thanks Tricia, I hadn’t remembered since you told us 3 pages ago. I think she mentioned Dr. Jake’s green eyes at least 20 times, which was roughly 19 times too many. The writing didn’t feel polished at all, the dialogue was awkward and SUPER corny. Given the reviews I’ve seen for this author and this book in particular, I wasn’t expecting such juvenile writing

Plot Twists and Unreliable Narrators:
there’s a difference between a plot twist that is surprising because it was well written and a plot twist that was surprising because it genuinely doesn’t make sense with the story. I guess she tried so hard to confuse the reader that she also confused herself and just wrote a twist that makes no sense with everything leading up to that point. Also, it seems that a lot of thriller writers need to sit down and discuss what an unreliable narrator is. I have seen plenty of unreliable narrators done well, but Tricia just straight up turned into a different person after the plot twist. It was ridiculous and felt cheap and unbelievable and it didn’t make sense with anything we had learned about her up to that point. it would have worked better from third person, but in first person it left me feeling extremely unsatisfied.

The ENDING?????
I love a book where we see the bad guy get away with something, or where justice isn’t completely served. But I cannot stand this ending. Everyone is a murderer, no one gets caught, and then I’m just supposed to be happy that they had a baby and are living there happily ever after as murderers. I already hated every character in the book, but it would’ve been nice to have an ending that didn’t feel like such a cop out.

overall, the only thing i liked was how quickly it was over. the audiobook was 7 hours so at least my suffering ended quickly. I don’t get how this has such rave reviews because everything about it was so infuriating.