Someone's Listening by Seraphina Nova Glass
I would like to thank Sarah from Titan for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher - Titan Books
Published - Out Now
Price - £8.99 paperback
She wrote the book on escaping a predator... Now one is coming for her.
Faith Finley has it all: she's a talented psychologist with a flourishing career, a bestselling author and the host of a popular local radio program, Someone's Listening, with Dr. Faith Finley. She's married to the perfect man, Liam Finley, a respected food critic.
Until the night everything goes horribly wrong, and Faith's life is shattered forever.
Liam is missing--gone without a trace--and the police are suspicious of everything Faith says. They either think she has something to hide, or that she's lost her mind.
And then the notes begin to arrive. Notes that are ripped from Faith's own book, the one that helps victims leave their abusers. Notes like "Lock your windows. Consider investing in a steel door."
As the threats escalate, the mystery behind Liam's disappearance intensifies. And Faith's very life will depend on finding answers
Everyone makes mistakes - we zig instead of zag, left instead of right and if we do that enough times our lives end up off kilter and trying to get back to where we want to be is one of the hardest things people can do. In fiction those mistakes can have deadly consequences. In Seraphina Nova Glass’s new thriller Someone’s Listening we are taken through a chaotic ride into one woman’s nightmare as everything she thinks she knows in her life is overturned again and again.
Our narrator is Faith Finlay an up and coming psychologist with a focus on helping people escape abusers. Radio and TV are beckoning and a new book deal is on the horizon. She is happily married to her soulmate Liam, a successful restaurant critic - they are the golden couple and of course happiness never lasts - on the night of the new book’s release Faith driving home is plunged into a terrible accident. We quickly zip forward to find Faith alone, only just recovered from serious injuries and on the edge of sobriety as on that night Liam vanished from the scene of the accident. The police feel that a number of prior events in Faith’s life may have driven him to seek a new life of his own alone. Faith has no idea where she is going. A few chance encounters though start to suggest all with Liam was not what it seemed and the police have finally made a discovery that means Faith realises she herself may be in danger.
I was impressed how much Glass throws at us in this thriller. There is an air of shifting chaos in Faith’s story reflecting Faith’s own mental state. It is unusual to have a main lead who we clearly see is suffering a form of PTSD (although due to circumstances not fully aware of it themselves) and she when we find her has very little left to anchor herself to. In a few flashbacks we see the earlier more confident and happy Faith to give us the contrast but the focus of this novel is can Faith now get herself together adjust in time before more things go wrong. Trying to find out what happened to Liam gives her a route out. As a reader though you’re likely going to be saying ‘nooooo’ a lot as she makes some instinctive decisions that put herself more in harm’s way. Happily this is a novel about people learning to take control for their lives again so you do get invested in Faith’s quest for the truth.
The other pleasure is as so much is being throw at Faith the mystery as to what is going on and where is Liam is a truly tangled web but as the story progresses and we slowly wind through the many suspects we get to a remarkable and tense conclusion I didn’t see coming until way too late which is always a pleasure. A thriller that keeps you guessing all the way to the end but makes perfect sense in retrospect is always impressive. My one reservation is that sometimes things felt a little too conveniently coincidental but the high level of misdirection helped obscure me working out too quickly what was going on.
This is a fine tense thriller that fans of psychological thrillers should quickly devour as we hope Faith finds her way through the maze of trouble she finds herself in.
