The Surrogate by Louise Jensen
Genre: Mystery & Thriller
Publication Date: December 4th, 2018
ARC from the publisher
Kat and her husband Nick have tried everything to become parents, and are on the point of giving up. Then a chance encounter with Kat’s childhood friend Lisa gives Kat and Nick one last chance to achieve their dream.
But Kat and Lisa’s history hides dark secrets.
And there is more to Lisa than meets the eye.
As dangerous cracks start to appear in Kat’s perfect picture of happily-ever-after, she realizes that she must face her fear of the past to save her family…
| Book Review |
Since I rediscovered my love of Thrillers earlier this year, I’ve had such good luck with the genre; The Surrogate from Louis Jensen continued that streak. In this book, we meet Kat and Nick as they’re at a crossroads on what to do after two attempts at adopting a child have failed. But when a friend from Kat’s past shows up at just the right time and offers to be a surrogate, Kat jumps on it, and it’s not long before Nick is also on board.
I don’t want to say too much because I feel like things would be given away, but this book was so gripping. From the beginning, I had an idea where this was going, and while that initial thought was so very wrong, I did have some theories that panned out. Though if you have 18,000 theories reading a book and one or two of them pans out, are you really that intuitive? This book is told from Kat’s and Nick’s points of view, and the timeline switches back and forth between ‘then’ and ‘now.’ What got me really invested was that I loved Kat and Nick so much that I didn’t want anything bad to happen to them, and I also didn’t want either one of them to be a villain. It felt like there were twists and turns around every corner, and I was always being thrown for a loop. Kat wanted to be a mother so very badly, and it was always so far out of reach for her that her entire world zeroed in on that. Again, the author did such a good job making me feel for Kat and wanting her to get everything her heart desired, that I knew no matter what happened, I was going to be gutted. I know I’m being vague, but I want there to be as many surprises in store for you as there were for me.
The closer we got to the end, I was able to see parts of how things were going to come together, but I didn’t figure anything out far enough in advance to negate the shock of it, and nothing in it’s completeness. If you’re a fan of Mystery/Thriller books, I think you’ll enjoy The Surrogate very much. The author did a fantastic job of getting me attached to the characters while being suspicious of absolutely everyone in Kat and Nick’s lives, and I just couldn’t put it down.
The way you describe how this one gripped you and made you buy into the main characters piqued my interest, too. I’ve enjoyed getting into pyschological thrillers, but I don’t like the ones where you are meant to dislike everyone including the protagonists. This sounds good.
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That sounds really good. I can imagine all kinds of things going wrong in that type of situation.
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