Title: The Safe Place
Author: Anna Downes
Published: July 2020, Minotaur Books
Format: ARC Paperback, 352 pages
Source: Publisher
Summary:
Emily is a mess.
Emily Proudman just lost her acting agent, her job, and her apartment in one miserable day.
Emily is desperate.
Scott
Denny, a successful and charismatic CEO, has a problem that neither his
business acumen nor vast wealth can fix. Until he meets Emily.
Emily is perfect.
Scott
offers Emily a summer job as a housekeeper on his remote, beautiful
French estate. Enchanted by his lovely wife Nina, and his eccentric
young daughter, Aurelia, Emily falls headlong into this oasis of
wine-soaked days by the pool. But soon Emily realizes that Scott and
Nina are hiding dangerous secrets, and if she doesn’t play along, the
consequences could be deadly.
Superbly tense and oozing with
atmosphere, Anna Downs’s debut is the perfect summer suspense, with the
modern gothic feel of Ruth Ware and the morally complex family dynamics
of Lisa Jewell.
Welcome to paradise…will you ever be able to leave?
My thoughts: There is nothing I love more than discovering a talented new author in the thriller/suspense genre and Anna Downes is definitely going to be one author to watch if this book is anything to go by!
This book captivated me from the start and it is completely addicting – it is easily a book that can be consumed in a few sittings. It’s that kind of book that once you start reading it, you really don’t want to put it down, and if it hadn’t been for a migraine, I probably would have read this in one day! I loved how almost right off the bat, you get that sense that not all is what it appears to be and I totally felt an uneasiness settle over me and that only built as the book progressed. I just kept waiting for something bad to happen or something awful to be discovered and boy did I not guess where this was heading.
I loved the characters. I loved that I had the sense that I could not really trust them, so I read with a sense of trepidation, never knowing what was going to happen. It really heightened my own tension while reading this and made me super anxious to see how things would play out.
I loved how this family drama is wrapped up in a thriller. The way it was told, alternating between Scott and Emily’s points of view, with some of Nina’s journal entries thrown in here and there, really keep you engaged and we learn information about Nina at just the right time. It really is quite brilliantly structured to keep you hooked throughout and as I mentioned already, I was not expecting the ending at all.
This is definitely a book I recommend adding to your summer reading list – it’s an engrossing read that will keep you flipping those pages to see what is really going on. And I for sure will be keeping an eye out for what comes next from Anna Downes!
