2019 Book Review #30: You Don't Want To Know

WOW!

Talk about a page turner!

I've seen this author's books on the library shelves but had only ever read one of hers and it was a long time ago. I remembered it as being a really good suspenseful mystery.  This one was just as good if not better!

STORY SUMMARY

The story opens on an isolated island off the coast of Washington.  The big mansion on the island is known as Neptune's Gate and has been in the Church family for many generations.  The only other thing on the island is the now closed down mental health facility which was more like an asylum for the criminally insane.  It was known as Sea Cliff. Several years earlier, their most famous criminal was housed there, a man named Lester Reece.  He escaped and hasn't been seen since. Most of the locals believe he drowned.

Ava Church Garrison has just been released from the mental ward of a Seattle hospital and is back at her home on the island.  She owns most of Neptune's Gate except for one cousin who is still holding out on selling Ava her share. Her cousin is Jewel-Anne and she is younger and in a wheelchair, paralyzed from a boating accident that took the life of Ava's only brother Kelvin.  This happened about 4 years ago, shortly before Ava and her husband Wyatt's baby boy Noah was born.

 Jewel-Anne has always blamed Ava for the accident as it was Ava's idea to go out on the boat.  Khloe, Ava's best friend and once engaged to Kelvin, is now Ava's maid and she too blames Ava for the accident.  Two years after his birth, Noah disappeared and Ava has had mental health issues ever since.  One thing that hinders Ava is that the psychiatrist assigned to her keeps her on medications that makes Ava drowsy.  Ava insists that she sees Noah at the end of the dock on the island and that she can hear him crying out for her in the middle of the night.

Noah has not been found and most people believe he wandered off the dock and drowned during a Christmas party that was going on in the house at that time.

Ava has spent the last two years in and out of the hospital and has been literally shattered by her grief.  She hasn't even been able to recall her supposed suicide attempt (her wrists were slashed in a bathtub in the house) nor any of the details surrounding Noah's disappearance or her own husband's estrangement from her.  However, now that she is back at Neptune's Gate and only pretending to take the medication, her memory is slowly returning.

As Ava's mind begins to clear and her memory regains its strength, her suspicions begin to grow and she can't help shake the feeling that somehow her own family (cousins, husband, staff, and best friend..and possibly the psychiatrist) is involved in Noah's disappearance!  Someone is also trying to make Ava think that she is going insane!

Ava can no longer trust the people around her.....she does trust the new ranch hand that her husband hired (Austen Dern) to help care for the horses and gardens.  Ava can't explain it but she feels that Austen has his own story to tell and his own secrets and yet somehow she is drawn to him.

Because Ava can no longer trust the people around her, she goes to visit a local hypnotist named Cheryl who helps her try to restore her memories.  Ava won't stop from getting to the bottom of Noah's disappearance.  She firmly believes he is still alive as no body has ever been found.  Meanwhile, someone is pulling horrible pranks on her....making tapes of a child crying, burying a doll to look like Noah in a box in the garden.  Also, Cheryl is found murdered in her own home and shortly later, the psychiatrist is found murdered in the exact same way as Cheryl.  When Jewel-Anne is murdered in her own bed, in the exact same way as the other women, all eyes begin to look at Ava as the killer.  But Ava knows otherwise and will stop at nothing to get to the truth.

Ava is beginning to uncover the truth but it's much more dangerous than she ever suspected!  What price will need to be paid for her to uncover the truth of the last 2 years??

MY THOUGHTS

This was a suspenseful, fast moving book.  Although it's so unbelievable...it IS fiction...there are pockets of weirdness and things that COULD happen that make it so exciting and unpredictable. Just when I thought I had the mystery of Noah's disappearance solved, the author threw in another twist!  I love that!

The character development and setting is very well done.  The characters are rich in personality and you find yourself trying to figure out who might just be out to get Ava.

This book kept me up late at night reading far longer than I normally do because it's a real page-turner!

The themes in the book seem to be betrayal, marriage difficulties, greed, adultery, friendship, and the deep abiding love of a mother to her child.

In my opinion, this book is appropriate for ages 17 and older (due to some mature content).

On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest, I rate this a 9. (It would be a 10 if for not all the swear words which I find completely unnecessary...thank goodness I could gloss over those).