Saturday, March 31, 2018

Silent Victim

Book: Silent Victim
Author: Caroline Mithcell

Emma is a loving wife, a devoted mother…and an involuntary killer. For years she’s been hiding the dead body of the teacher who seduced her as a teen.

It’s a secret that might have stayed buried if only her life had been less perfect. A promotion for Emma’s husband, Alex, means they can finally move to a bigger home with their young son. But with a buyer lined up for their old house, Emma can’t leave without destroying every last trace of her final revenge…

Returning to the shallow grave in the garden, she finds it empty. The body is gone.

Panicked, Emma confesses to her husband. But this is only the beginning. Soon, Alex will discover things about her he’ll wish he’d learned sooner. And others he’ll long to forget.-Goodreads

Review: As a parent of a daughter, this book scared the crap out of me. A naive teenager, Emma was targeted by her art teacher and lured into a "relationship" with him. He manipulated her and the people around them to think she was targeting him and crazy. Years later, Emma kills him and buries the body on her property. When her husband announces they are moving for a job promotion and he's sold their house, she has to figure out what to do with the body. 

This was written in different timelines and narratives. In the present day, we followed Emma and her husband Alex as she tries to figure out what to do and as he discovers there is more to his wife than he originally thought. In the older timeline, we follow Emma as a naive teenager whose mother and older sister abandoned the family, with no friends but a teacher who seems to really believe in her. Where this book shines (in the creepiest way possible) is the narrative of the art teacher who decides to seduce Emma. He's truly evil. Some parts of the book were predictable but I think overall, the book was very well done. My only complaint is that we are never given a really detailed account of how Emma and her teacher ended up in the field on the back side of her property. 

Grade: 4/5

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