Beautiful Liar: a gripping suspense thriller by Louise Mullins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a very readable thriller that revolves around domestic abuse.
The story begins with Joel dying in a car maintenance accident or was it an accident?
The main characters are Joel and Erica and the story is told from both Erica and Joel’s point of view and moves from past to future. The author has made an excellent job of naming the chapters in such a way that you know what period and who is telling the story. The reader, therefore, gets the story from both points of view with an input from Rose and Lily towards the end.
Joel is a horrible character I am sure that is what Louise intended. He has very fixed views about the role of his wife and women in general and his good looks and charisma combined with his wealth allows this to grow and feed his personality until he becomes a monster. Erica only sees a glimpse of the ‘real’ Joel but that is enough to terrify her into submission.
Before meeting Joel Erica was quite content with life. She had a good job and shared a flat with her best friend, Rose, who also features in the story. Erica meets Joel shortly after escaping a bad relationship and Rose is making plans to move in with her boyfriend. She is therefore vulnerable and Joel takes advantage of this and tries to turn her into someone that fits his criteria.
There is a large amount of erotica and violent/explicit sex that spoiled it for me a little.
It is a very good story that discusses many aspects of domestic violence. The ending is a curve ball that the reader won’t see coming.
Overall the book is well written but I found a few major errors of duplicated paragraphs and other errors. However, I was reading an advance copy and hopefully these will be corrected in the published version.
Thankyou to Bloodhound Books for providing me with an advance copy of this book in return for an honest review.
#Bloodhoundbooks #louisemullins #thriller
