About the Book
They’ve taken your friend, but only to get to you. What do you do?
Lorraine—“Rainy”—lives at the top of Tiger Mountain. Remote, moody, cloistered in pine trees and fog, it’s a sanctuary, a new life. She can hide from the disturbing past she wants to forget.
If she’s allowed to.
When Rainy reluctantly agrees to a girls’ weekend in Vegas, she’s prepared for an exhausting parade of shots and slot machines. But after a wild night, her friend Braithe doesn’t come back to the hotel room.
And then Rainy gets the text message, sent from Braithe’s phone: someone has her. But Rainy is who they really want, and Rainy knows why.
What follows is a twisted, shocking journey on the knife-edge of life and death. If she wants to save Braithe—and herself—the only way is to step back into the past.
This seething, gut-punch of a thriller can only have sprung from the fiendish brain of Tarryn Fisher, one of the most cunning writers of our time.
My Review
Oof, this was a twisted one. First, the subject matter does revolve heavily around a cult and features child abuse, sexual abuse, drugs and more, so if that’s a sensitive topic to you, you might consider skipping this one. I was equal parts fascinated yet horrified by reading Rainy’s story – escaping a cult that ultimately took her mother’s life, creating a new persona to escape the childhood trauma, only to be suckered back into the torment when a girls trip to Vegas goes awry. I live in Las Vegas and it’s my favorite city, so when I realized that was a storyline as well, I definitely wanted to pick this one up. We really get two parts – Rainy’s time in the cult and her adult life when she is drawn back to it. The earlier parts – Rainy and her mother arriving for help after her father passed away, slowly being manipulated and brain washed by the leader, the torment and torture they all went through – those scenes will stay with for a long time. I was absorbed in that area of the book and it was hard to put down.
When we get to Lainey’s adult life – in a relationship, living peaceful, trying to make friends in a new city – my interest faltered slightly. I didn’t quite grasp the friendship bonds between all the women, and they all seemed extremely catty and self-centered. The game they played in Vegas made me particularly scratch my head, and trying to make their own “friends” highly uncomfortable and divulge private information felt gross to me. I wasn’t quite sure why Rainey seemingly on her own cadence decided to play chicken with the cult leader, but the ending was shocking and sad. This one made me feel a lot of emotions and I was tense the entire time reading it. A good thriller.
4 stars
