Quinn Alexander has committed an unthinkable crime.
To avoid spending her life in prison, Quinn makes a run for it. She leaves behind her home, her job, and her family. She grabs her passport and heads for the northern border before the police can discover what she’s done.
But when an unexpected snowstorm forces her off the road, Quinn must take refuge at the broken-down, isolated Baxter Motel. The handsome and kindly owner, Nick Baxter, is only too happy to offer her a cheap room for the night.
Unfortunately, the Baxter Motel isn’t the quiet safe haven it seemed to be. The motel has a dark and disturbing past. And in the dilapidated house across the way, the silhouette of Nick’s ailing wife is always at the window. Always watching.
In the morning, Quinn must leave the motel. She’ll pack up her belongings and get back on the road to freedom.
But first, she must survive the night.

I found this novel deeply disappointing. It started with a Hitchcock ‘Pscho’ vibe and devolved into a Hallmark Happy Ever After fantasy. The struture of novel was clunky and disjointed. There were multiple continuity problems which came to feel like tricks played on the reader by a clumsy magician who assumed the reader had short-term memory issues. The big twists lost impact because they only worked if one of the characters had a complere personality transplant. The ending left reality so far behind that it had me laughing in embarrassment of the “Surely she’s not going to… Wow! She actually went there.” eye-rolling kind.

So, if it was that bad, why did I spend the best part of eight hours listening to it? Well, firstly. some of it is well written. There are some clever ideas, some creepy situations and some love-to-hate-them characters. Secondly, I downloaded this (for free I’m glad to say) to listen to on two long car journeys. I reached the halfway mark on the first journey and, while I wasn’t that engaged, I wasn’t disappointed either. It was on the second journey that the novel fell apart. If I’d been at home, I would have skipped the last third of the book.

I’m not going to give away any spoilers as not knowing what’s going to happen next is one of the main things that kept me reading but I will share my experience at a top level.

The first half of the book was a little slow but seemed to be setting up an interesting story. Even though the book opened with Quinn washing someone’s blood from her hands, the tension in the first scenes felt muted. For me, it was an arms-length experience rather than an edge-of-the-seat read. Some of this was the pace, which seemed to me to drag. Some of it was Quinn’s inablity to think things through and me being put off by Quinn’s ‘poor little me’ act.

The motel set up: remote, deserted, decrepit motel, found at night during a snow storm, had a ‘Bates Motel’ feel that should have pulled me into the story but again the storytelling felt a little slow and it didn’t deliver the sense of threat that it might have done.

Then, just before the halfway mark, there was an unexpected rollback in time and a switch from Quinn to her older sister, Claudia.

The switch killed the plot’s momentum but did introduce a more interesting character. Claudia, like Quinn, was difficult to like but she brought a faster pace to the storytelling and for a while, things went well.

Then the next rollback happened at the 60% mark and the plot lost all momentum for a second time. This time the story went back by a decade or so while Rosalie told me the story of her life with Nick and how he and she came to run this now dilapidated motel with the boarded up restaurant called ‘Rosalie’s’. For me, this was one of the strongest parts of the book. Rosalie’s story and her relationship with Nick felt real. The nature of that relationship also made me question a lot of what I thought I knew about the plot, which justified the disruption of the flow.

About the 80% mark, there was another clumsy shift in perspective to Rob, Claudia’s husband and another plot momentum-killing rollback in time. The real decline of the novel started here. We were working towards the big reveals in the final hour and it quickly became clear that those reveals required one character to have a complete personality transplant and made a number of things the reader had been told seem like deceptions that misinformed rather than just mislead.

The deceptions annoyed me and spoiled the big reveal (which was actually quite clever). If the book had stopped there, I’d have grumbled about thriller writers who cheat to make their plots work but I’d also have acknowledged that there were a few good character portraits in the book and that, despite the clumsy transitions, it was mostly entertaining.

Then I endured half an hour of ‘Epilogue’. An epilogue is supposed to bring a reader closure. It’s not supposed to have the reader alternating between rolling their eyes and grinding their teeth. It also typically doesn’t have a ‘So THATS who killed…” in it. The big reveal in the epilogue was ok. Not unexpected but it made sense. The rest felt like a fairygodmother had arrived to make sure that all of the remaining characters got their wishes granted. It was pure sugar and very out of place.