I hate when they market books with blurbs that are all like “You’ll never see the twist!” Well, of course I will now. Why can’t I discover there is a twist on my own? Trust your damn readers publishers. We are smarter than you think.
So Behind Her Eyes is a fairly typical Jane Eyre-esque Brit-mystery that alternates points of view between Behind Her Eyes‘ Jane and Mrs. Rochester. There’s some missing people and bodies and burning-down of things. Then there’s the twist, which the book builds up to, so it isn’t completely out-of-nowhere, nor was it particularly hard to guess. What took me until the explanation to figure out was the why of the twist (because my mind works in a bland hetero-normative way I found out via Behind Her Eyes).
So I don’t know. There is definitely some cleverness to Behind Her Eyes. The pacing doesn’t drag (as it shouldn’t) for a mystery novel. At some point, when I was a kid living in the UK, I must have visited some similar places to the novel, because I could envisage the apartment and the houses and the office perfectly. Or maybe I should give credit to the author’s ability to describe these places without dragging down the plot through over-description. Ignoring the twist, it’s an above-average, vicarious-thrill-safe-from-the-comfort-of-my-own-home, marketed-to-women, thriller. Including the twist, it’s still that, but a bit harder to categorize.
Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinsborough went on sale January 26, 2017.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.