If She Dies
by Erik Therme
GENRE: Psychological Thriller
BLURB:
Nine
months ago, Tess’s five-year-old daughter was killed in a car
accident. The driver, Brady Becker, was sentenced to two years in
prison. It didn't make Tess’s pain go away.
Brady
also has a daughter: A twelve-year-old named Eve who walks to
Chandler Middle School every day. Tess knows this because she's been
watching Eve for the last three weeks. It isn’t fair that Brady’s
daughter gets to live, while Tess’s daughter does not.
When
Eve goes missing, all eyes turn to Tess, who doesn’t have an alibi.
But Tess isn’t guilty.
Or
so she believes.
Excerpt:
I close my eyes and put a hand on the top of Lily’s headstone, trying to visualize the vibrant, living Lily inside my head who sang and danced around our living room with her favorite stuffed animal, Wapsie the Cat, pinned to her chest. I so want to see this Lily.
But I don’t.
I only see Lily’s unmoving body inside her tiny mahogany casket, six feet under the earth. If the embalmer did his job correctly, she would look relatively the same with the exception of dark spots on her cheeks and neck. In another few months, her skin will start to discolor and her fingernails will turn black. These are things I don’t want to know, but I do know. The internet is no one’s friend.
“I have to go, baby,” I say, rising from the ground. I bend forward to brush some grass clippings from my knees, then frown as I notice the grass on the other side of the headstone is discolored. No, not discolored . . . colored. As in, the tips of the grass are red, almost like a crimson shadow, and it only takes me a moment longer to realize it’s spray-paint. Growing up, my father was a spray-paint fanatic, painting everything from bicycle frames to bird feeders in our front yard, always leaving an overspray of paint mist. My mother hated it, even though it only lasted a few days until my father mowed. But the grass here is short, recently mowed, which means the paint on the ground is fresh.
I slowly circle the headstone, still unsure at what I’m seeing, until I reach the backside and my breath catches in my throat.
Someone has spray-painted Lily’s headstone with a bloody red X.
My Review:
Nine months ago Tess lost her five-year-old daughter in an accident. Tess is having a hard time dealing with the loss of her baby girl. The way she deals with it is by following, stalking, watching the man’s daughter who ran her baby girl over.
Tess is having a hard time coping with her daughter’s death and her marriage is suffering because of it but that is something she can’t deal with at the moment. Tess’s husband, Josh doesn’t seem to understand what she is going through.
Josh is grieving for his daughter as well which Tess can’t see because of her pain. Josh is grieving in a different way than Tess. Tess wants to keep all of her daughter’s things and Josh thinks they should give some of it away.
Josh and Tess have been traveling down the same road until that awful day that their little girl was taken from them and they were slammed in the face with that big black wall of pain, loss, and sadness. On that awful day, their paths changed and they both went a different way. Can they find their way back to each other? Can they knock down that wall of grief and find their way out to the other side and each other?
The guy, Brady, who ran her daughter over is in prison serving a two-year sentence. Things start to turn ugly when Brady’s daughter, Eve turns up missing. Tess is the number one suspect. Is Tess guilty? Did she take Eve? Is she innocent? Or is she just a mother dealing with her loss and pain the only way she knew how?
If She Dies is a story about loss, grief, and suffering, with twists after twists slowly revealing its secrets. I would come to a point where I thought I knew what was going and then another twist would pop up and I was back at the drawing board wondering again. If She Dies literally had me on the edge of my seat the whole time. The suspense was a killer, to say the least. If She Dies will be with me long, long after the last page was read.
The ending and how it all turned out was a shocker. I definitely never would have guessed that outcome. I still have lots of questions that have not been answered but isn’t that what a good book does...leave you with unanswered questions to keep you hanging on and wanting more. Well, I definitely want more.
I highly recommend If She Dies to all suspense and thriller fans. One-click your copy of If She Dies today to being this epic suspense story of a lifetime! If I could I would definitely rate it more than five stars!
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Erik Therme has thrashed in garage bands, inadvertently harbored runaways, and met Darth Vader. When he’s not at his computer, he can be found cheering on his youngest daughter’s volleyball team, or watching horror movies with his oldest. He currently resides in Iowa City, Iowa—one of only twenty-eight places in the world that UNESCO has certified as a City of Literature.
BUY LINKS
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6 comments:
Thanks for hosting!
SO glad you enjoyed it, and thanks for sharing! :)
I liked the excerpt.
I loved the excerpt and think the book sounds great.
Great excerpt and review!
This is awesome
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