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Then - In charge of her little sister at the beach, Claire allowed Eleanor to walk to the shop alone to buy an ice cream. Placing a coin into her hand, Claire told her to be quick, knowing how much she wanted the freedom. Eleanor never came back. Now - The time has finally come to sell the family farm and Claire is organizing a reunion of her dearest friends, the same friends who were present the day her sister went missing. When another girl disappears, long-buried secrets begin to surface.
Kirstie Rawlings is jolted awake by a child crying. Racing upstairs to check on her newborn, she is plunged into every parents’ worst nightmare. She hears an unknown voice in the baby monitor saying, "Let’s take the child - and go." Is someone trying to steal her little girl?
You're alone. You're vulnerable. And you have something that someone else wants. At any cost. Claudia Morgan-Brown finally has it all. Pregnant with a much-wanted first baby of her own, she has a happily established family of two small step-sons and a loving husband with a great career. But she is also committed to her full-time job as a social worker, and her husband travels often. So when Claudia hires Zoe to help her around the house in anticipation of the baby’s arrival, it seems like the answer to her prayers.
Twenty-five-year-old scrappy Aubrey is fed up with Tom, a married neurologist with two children. When he's not shoving their relationship on the back burner, he's canceling their dates. With a frightening health diagnosis looming over her shoulder, Aubrey concocts a desperate plan to have Tom forever. Kill the wife. Take her place. Befriending Tom's successful, kind wife comes easily to Aubrey. However, the closer they become, the more doubts Aubrey has about following through. Then, a shocking discovery changes everything....
When a child’s scream pierces the night, Mira does what any good neighbor would do: She calls the police. She wants to make sure that Rosie, the little girl next door, is safe. Opening her front door to the police the next morning, Gemma's picture-perfect family is forced under scrutiny of social services. As her flawless life begins to crumble around her, Gemma must fight to defend the family she loves and protect her daughter from the terrible secret she's been keeping. When Rosie disappears without a trace, Gemma thinks she only has herself to blame....
On a wet road in the black of night, Karl Seabury is driving home to his pregnant wife. Suddenly, caught in his headlights in the middle of the road is a woman shaking with fright. The woman says her name is Liz Smith, that her home was attacked, and that she was the only one to escape. In a split-second decision, Karl decides to help her to safety. But Liz is hiding a dark secret, and now, his good deed has put his family in terrible danger....
Then - In charge of her little sister at the beach, Claire allowed Eleanor to walk to the shop alone to buy an ice cream. Placing a coin into her hand, Claire told her to be quick, knowing how much she wanted the freedom. Eleanor never came back. Now - The time has finally come to sell the family farm and Claire is organizing a reunion of her dearest friends, the same friends who were present the day her sister went missing. When another girl disappears, long-buried secrets begin to surface.
Kirstie Rawlings is jolted awake by a child crying. Racing upstairs to check on her newborn, she is plunged into every parents’ worst nightmare. She hears an unknown voice in the baby monitor saying, "Let’s take the child - and go." Is someone trying to steal her little girl?
You're alone. You're vulnerable. And you have something that someone else wants. At any cost. Claudia Morgan-Brown finally has it all. Pregnant with a much-wanted first baby of her own, she has a happily established family of two small step-sons and a loving husband with a great career. But she is also committed to her full-time job as a social worker, and her husband travels often. So when Claudia hires Zoe to help her around the house in anticipation of the baby’s arrival, it seems like the answer to her prayers.
Twenty-five-year-old scrappy Aubrey is fed up with Tom, a married neurologist with two children. When he's not shoving their relationship on the back burner, he's canceling their dates. With a frightening health diagnosis looming over her shoulder, Aubrey concocts a desperate plan to have Tom forever. Kill the wife. Take her place. Befriending Tom's successful, kind wife comes easily to Aubrey. However, the closer they become, the more doubts Aubrey has about following through. Then, a shocking discovery changes everything....
When a child’s scream pierces the night, Mira does what any good neighbor would do: She calls the police. She wants to make sure that Rosie, the little girl next door, is safe. Opening her front door to the police the next morning, Gemma's picture-perfect family is forced under scrutiny of social services. As her flawless life begins to crumble around her, Gemma must fight to defend the family she loves and protect her daughter from the terrible secret she's been keeping. When Rosie disappears without a trace, Gemma thinks she only has herself to blame....
On a wet road in the black of night, Karl Seabury is driving home to his pregnant wife. Suddenly, caught in his headlights in the middle of the road is a woman shaking with fright. The woman says her name is Liz Smith, that her home was attacked, and that she was the only one to escape. In a split-second decision, Karl decides to help her to safety. But Liz is hiding a dark secret, and now, his good deed has put his family in terrible danger....
You lost your daughter. You will never forgive yourself. And now someone is determined to make you pay.... Seventeen years ago, something happened to Jess' daughter, Beth. The memory of it still makes her blood run cold. Jess has tried everything to make peace with that day, and the part she played in what happened. It was only a brief moment of desire...but she'll pay for it with a lifetime of guilt.
Rose Denton wakes up in her car. She has no memory of how she got there. But she knows something bad happened.... There’s blood on the windscreen and bonnet - but it’s not hers, and there’s no sign of anything or anyone she might have hit. The last thing she remembers is being in a hotel on a business trip, but now she’s miles away. Back home, her daughter’s boyfriend is missing. The last thing he did was argue with Rose over money. He left no note, no text, no clue as to his whereabouts. The police have questions - and so does Rose.
Two years ago, Tom and Caroline Johnson committed suicide, one seemingly unable to live without the other. Their adult daughter, Anna, is struggling to come to terms with her parents' deaths, unable to comprehend why they chose to end their lives. Now with a young baby herself, she feels her mother's presence keenly and is determined to find out what really happened to her parents. But as Anna digs up the past, someone is trying to stop her. She soon learns that nothing is as it seemed.
From the outside, Essie’s life looks idyllic: a loving husband, a beautiful house in a good neighborhood, and a nearby mother who dotes on her grandchildren. But few of Essie’s friends know her secret shame: that in a moment of maternal despair, she once walked away from her newborn, asleep in her carriage in a park. Disaster was avoided, and Essie got better, but she still fears what lurks inside her, even as her daughter gets older and she has a second baby.
From behind the wheel of her car, Tess Kincaid glimpses a woman walking down a Madison, Wisconsin, street. They've never met, but Tess sees the same features every time she looks in the mirror. Tess introduces herself and discovers that she and her doppelganger, Mimi, have more than appearance in common. They even share the same birthday. Mimi - confident and outgoing where Tess is understated and shy - is convinced they're twins, separated shortly after birth. When a body is discovered in a local marsh, Tess is entangled in a search for the truth....
On a train with her husband, miles from home and their four-year-old son, Ben, Sophie receives a chilling phone call. Two boys are in hospital after a tragic accident. One of them is Ben. She thought she could trust Emma, her new friend, to look after her little boy. After all, Emma’s a kindred spirit - someone Sophie was sure she could bare her soul to, despite the village rumours. But Sophie can’t shake the feeling that she’s made an unforgivable mistake and now her whole family is in danger.
When two young sisters disappear from a strip mall parking lot in a small Pennsylvania town, their devastated mother hires an enigmatic bounty hunter, Alice Vega, to help find the girls. Immediately shut out by a local police department already stretched thin by budget cuts and the growing OxyContin and meth epidemic, Vega enlists the help of a disgraced former cop, Max Caplan. Cap is a man trying to put the scandal of his past behind him and move on, but Vega needs his help to find the girls, and she will not be denied.
Teenager Abigail Ryder is devastated when she gets home from school to find her family gone. Nothing makes sense. Things are missing from the house and her stepsisters' room is completely empty. But the police think she's trouble, and when grandmother Eleanor tells her to forget them all and move on, there's no choice other than face the future - alone. Fourteen years on, Abi and Adam are a happy couple on the verge of parenthood. But when the past comes back to haunt Abi, the only way forward is to go back and uncover the truth - and reveal the dreadful secrets a mother has been hiding all these years.
Years ago, in the town of Saxon Falls, young Kelsey Willard disappeared and was presumed dead. The tragedy left her family with a fractured life - a mother out to numb the pain, a father losing a battle with his own private demons, and a sister desperate for closure. But now another teenage girl has gone missing. It's ripping open old wounds for the Willards, dragging them back into a painful past, and leaving them unprepared for where it will take them next.
Deborah Jenkins pulls her coat around her as she sets out on her short walk home in the pouring rain. But she never makes it home that night. And she is never seen again.
Four years later, an abandoned baby girl is found wrapped in dirty rags on a doorstep. An anonymous phone call urges the police to run a DNA test on the baby. But nobody is prepared for the results. The newborn belongs to Deborah. She’s still alive.
Mark and Melissa Cain are thrilled to have found Jade, a babysitter who is brilliant with their young children. Having seen her own house burn to the ground, Jade needs them as much as they need her. Moving Jade into the family home can only be a good thing, can’t it? As Mark works long hours as a police officer and Melissa struggles with running a business, the family become ever more reliant on their babysitter, who is only too happy to help. And as Melissa begins to slip into depression, it’s Jade who is left picking up the pieces. But Mark soon notices things aren’t quite as they seem. Things at home feel wrong, and as Mark begins to investigate their seemingly perfect sitter, what he discovers shocks him to his core. He’s met Jade before. And now he suspects he might know what she wants.
When a woman's body is discovered in a cathedral and hours later a young man is found hanging from a tree outside his home, Detective Lottie Parker is called in to lead the investigation. Both bodies have the same distinctive tattoo clumsily inscribed on their legs. It's clear the pair are connected, but how? The trail leads Lottie to St Angela's, a former children's home, with a dark connection to her own family history. Suddenly the case just got personal.
Five years ago, 19-year-old Simon Hawkeswell hanged himself in his family home in Warwickshire, England. The reasons behind his choice remain a devastating mystery, and what's worse, not long after his death a wave of "sympathetic" suicides among local teens rocked the community. But that was then. A short-lived, sinister trend that's faded into oblivion. Or so everyone thought. When a young man is killed in a freak motorbike accident and the authorities find a suicide note on him, the nightmare of repeat suicides once again threatens their village.
Desperate for a vacation, Detective Inspector Lorraine Fisher has just come to Warwickshire for a stay with her sister Jo, but the atmosphere of the country house is unusually tense. Freddie, Jo's son, seems troubled and uncommunicative. After yet another young man takes his life, Freddie disappears and Lorraine knows there must be something dark around town that links the suicides. Finding answers should help her find Freddie, but they'll also lead to a shocking truth: whatever it is - or whoever it is - that's killing these young people is far more disturbing than she ever could have imagined, and unraveling the secret is just as dangerous as the secret itself.
Wicked, intense, and utterly compulsive, What You Left Behind is a twisted achievement of true psychological suspense, confirming Samantha Hayes as a top thriller writer.
What a great listen/read! You think you have everything figured out- and then out of left field- is another plot twist- and I was very impressed with the energy! I recommend this book many times over!
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
The narration was good, but the story (for me) was slow, boring and predictable. I enjoyed the insight into the character 'Gil'. I also like that the author was bringing to light themes of bullying, adolescent discovery and homelessness. However, it just didn't do it for me. There were too many characters with too many themes and none were fully developed. On top of that, the pace was painful.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
I finished it because I hate to leave a book unread, so to speak. However, it was about 20 chapters too long. The story dragged along painfully. Not so much suspenseful as frustrating because I wanted the author to get on with it. I ended up skipping several chapters toward the end so that I could just be done. And I still didn't miss anything.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
Any additional comments?
This story was interesting and captivating but the attempt at creating an autistic character overshadowed my overall impression of the suspense. The development of that character was inaccurate and aggravating as a person with autism. I kept telling myself it was the performance- each time the reader would happen on his voice she made him sound like something I don't think I would have heard if I had been reading the hard copy but the voice given the character has ruined the story for me. By the end of the performance I was disgusted and didn't care who loved, died, or ended up arrested.