Close

The Vanishing Year by Kate Moretti

More thrillers! I’ve had this book on my TBR list for a while and I finally got around to it. So let’s forgo the long introduction. Here is my review:

Zoe Whittaker is the beautiful young wife to handsome, charming Wall Street tycoon Henry Whittaker. She is a member of Manhattan’s social elite. She is on the board of one of the city’s most prestigious philanthropic organizations. She has a perfect Tribeca penthouse in the city and a gorgeous lake house in the country. But what nobody knows is that she was a completely different person 5 years ago. Back then, her life was in danger and she was on the run. Now, her secrets are coming back to haunt her…

Even though this novel has a similar premise to other novels from this genre, I was still excited to see how the author would make this story unique. This story had a slower build up than I had expected, which was sometimes a positive and other times a negative. I also don’t think the slower pace really helped in making the story filled with more tension or horror, which I would have liked to seen; it would have made me take the story more seriously if there was a steady increase in tension or fear, and while events were definitely happening, I never felt that urgency from them. The story, told completely from Zoe’s perspective, is told mostly in the present but also has excerpts from her past so that the reader gets a better idea of who she was and how she got to this point in her life. To be frank, I liked old Zoe a lot better than the new one; old Zoe actually had a personality unlike present Zoe. There were a lot of clues and red herrings thrown into the story such that I was suspicious of every character. I quite liked that because I can usually hone in to the main suspects and have the plot figured out in the first few chapters of a thriller. However, with that being said, there is such a thing as too many clues. When there are too many angles to consider, it muddles the plot, and this was something that happened here. The writing style was fine, nothing spectacular to mention but nothing terrible either. Overall, this was an interesting thriller, but nothing genre-bending. I would give this a 2.5/5 stars and recommend to anyone who loves thrillers.

Happy reading ~