Book Review | Behind Her Eyes

Finally another book to add toward my Popsugar reading challenge this one fits in the black and white cover category.

Louise is a single mom, a secretary, stuck in a modern-day rut. On a rare night out, she meets a man in a bar and sparks fly. Though he leaves after they kiss, she’s thrilled she finally connected with someone.

When Louise arrives at work on Monday, she meets her new boss, David. The man from the bar. The very married man from the bar…who says the kiss was a terrible mistake but who still can’t keep his eyes off Louise.

And then Louise bumps into Adele, who’s new to town and in need of a friend, but she also just happens to be married to David. David and Adele look like the picture-perfect husband and wife, but then why is David so controlling, and why is Adele so scared of him?

As Louise is drawn into David and Adele’s orbit, she uncovers more puzzling questions than answers. The only thing that is crystal clear is that something in this marriage is very, very wrong, but Louise can’t guess how wrong―and how far a person might go to protect their marriage’s secrets.

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I don’t think I’ve been this nervous about writing a review before, I think it’s because I know how difficult it’s going to be to share my feelings without giving anything away because I would hate to spoil the experience for anyone, so hopefully everything I’m saying makes sense. I have had this book on my TBR for a long time, I got it when it came out but there was so much hype around it that I was really put off reading it so I knew I had to leave it for a while, but now there’s a Netflix series and I really want to watch it but I knew I wanted to experience the book first, so here we are.

I have to say I was very intrigued from the start, there is definitely something about people getting themselves into sticky situations that is very hard to turn away from and I found that I couldn’t tear myself away from the pages because I could really empathise with both Lousie and Adele (at the start of the book anyway) and mostly I just wanted to see how this relationship would affect them. I really enjoyed these characters because of how morally ambiguous they both are at the start neither is doing the right thing but at that point neither seem like the bad guy either, of course, the cracks soon start to appear and I liked how devious and deceptive it became.

The plot was pitched perfectly for most of the book, the mistrust and suspicion kept things tense and addictive and every time I thought I could maybe see where the book was headed something new came up to throw me off balance. The pacing at times felt a bit uneven, it’s hard to say though whether this was because I was so desperate to know what was going to happen next that I had difficulty with the more introspective parts of the story but luckily the pull of the many mysteries woven into the story was enough to keep me going.

So now the bit that I’ve been dreading, when this book first came out part of the campaign was a hashtag #WTFthatending so I knew that there was going to be a bit of a twist at the end of the story and whilst I will wholeheartedly agree that I did not expect that ending and was really shocked by it, I must also admit to being a little disappointed. Personally, I feel like the ending kind of undermined the rest of the book, I wasn’t really that keen on the particular thread of the story that concluded everything, don’t get me wrong it is very original I don’t think I’ve read another thriller that has switched it up in such a way, but for me, it was just too much of a switch for the story I thought I was reading. Hopefully that all makes sense and hasn’t given anything important away because I really think this a book to be read with as little information as possible and even though the ending didn’t quite hit the mark for me it’s still a book I would recommend because I did highly enjoy it up until that point.