Hailed as a riveting new suspense novel about three ambitious women whose lives are turned upside down in the aftermath of a horrifying fire, which destroys a successful advertising agency and threatens to expose a tangled web of lies. So says the blurb about this book – and I was intrigued and thought I would enjoy this. But I had issues with the main characters, and it reminded me very much of Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty, where you are presented with the crime at the beginning, and then the story is told from different points of view leading up to the end.
Laura, Mia and Janie are the main characters, and they all have secrets and motives for burning down the agency. Laura returns from maternity leave, expecting to jump back into the thick of things with the client she had done work for already. But on her first day back, she finds that Mia is still quite ensconced at her desk – Mia had been hired to fill in during the maternity leave, and it appears that she isn’t about to leave anytime soon. Mia has a hidden agenda, and has been hired full time to look after the client Laura had been working with. Janie is married to the company director, and she’s been a wee bit jealous of Laura’s apparent closeness to her husband. Janie had been a successful lawyer, but gave that up to be a full time mom and support her husband. So there’s a lot of personal issues, and office politics going on here.
Laura soon becomes immersed in her work, becoming more and more suspicious of Mia, while her home life begins to unravel. Mia continues to try to keep her secrets from being revealed, while Janie just tries to hang onto her perfect home life. There’s a big showdown between the three women at the annual party given by Janie’s husband, and things begin to implode. With the shifting timelines, and different viewpoints, I wasn’t as absorbed by this as I expected.
It’s rather slow paced, and stuffed with a lot more descriptive details than I was interested in. Quite honestly, it hasn’t been long since I finished reading this, and I’ve already forgotten the big reveal at the end. So clearly, I wasn’t overly invested in this book!
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