Stay Inside and Read This Book

As promised, I am devoting this entire summer to recommendations for  psychological suspense thrillers. The books in this genre are probably my favorite beach/back deck/cottage/couch-inside-with-the-AC-on reads. Today I am recommending Saving Sophie by Sam Carrington. Carrington is a female author from the UK. I don’t know why this is, but I am discovering that a lot of what I would call literary psychological suspense thrillers are written by UK authors. Maybe it's the climate. Maybe it's the history. Maybe it's the ghosts.

Saving Sophie begins when teenaged daughter Sophie is returned home by the police to her horrified and out-of-their-mind-with-worry parents. No matter how she is prompted and questioned, she cannot remember where she was the previous night. Nothing is coming back to her. To top it off, Sophie's best friend is missing. No one can find her. Everyone fears the worse. The community is in chaos and worry.

That is only the beginning. The book seems to be really about Sohie's mother Karen, and a past occurrence that she has kept secret and private. Is it coming back, finally, to haunt her? Or is this crime something quite new and different?

Her past secret, kept even from her husband, has led to her present struggles with agoraphobia. Tremendously fearful, Karen doesn’t ever leave her house. I have never known anyone with this mental health issue, but know that it exists. But I do know that any kind of anxiety can leave a person helpless and afraid to move. 

The 'stay inside' part of this recommendation? That's in deference to Karen who won't leave her house.

And so Karen stays home, even when it’s the daughter of Karen’s closest friend who is missing. Karen will not leave the house to go over there to comfort her. There were times when I wanted to physically push her out of the house and call her a selfish slob! But there are deeper issues, and there were far deeper issues in the book. 

Here is an interesting link on agoraphobia.

Every character in this book struggles with their own demons, including the officers set about the solve the case. When you write reviews which refuse to spoil the books, sometimes the reviews can be exceedingly short. But, I won't spoil this book, I can't, but trust me when I say I raced to the ending of this one, and it didn't disappoint.

I give this book a full 4.5 stars. It has enough for me to recommend it here as a fun beach read, and one that will keep you glued to  it for the duration.

Next time: In a Dark Wood by Ruth Ware