Blood Wedding – Pierre Lemaitre – Genre – Thriller / Suspense / Psychological Thriller
Blurb: Normally happy and well-adjusted, Sophie Duguet doesn’t understand what’s happening to her: she has begun losing things, from her recently delivered mail to the car she parked the night before. She is constantly forgetting things she’s said and done, too . . . only to be reminded of them by her acquaintances. She’s even detained by the police for shoplifting–a crime she has no memory whatsoever of having committed.
But this is just the beginning. As she slowly sinks deeper into dementia and depression, things go from troubling to alarming. Soon she finds herself connected to the deaths of several people around her: a neighbor boy she is babysitting is murdered while in her care; a stranger seeks shelter with her and winds up dead; and finally, her employer is killed in a way that suggests she was responsible. And she doesn’t remember a thing about any of it.
Desperate to escape the nightmare, a confused and horrified Sophie changes her name and relocates, hoping to outrun the demons that have begun to plague her. But this may not be enough to stop the evil that has poisoned her life and begun to claim the lives of everyone around her . . .
My Review:I was so excited to see Pierre Lamaitre had written a standalone psychological thriller after the exceptional Verhoeven Trilogy and was delighted to receive an ARC from the publishers and Netgalley. I started the book and admit to being very confused at the beginning and after a third of the way through I actually gave up. However a few weeks later several members of THE Book Club on Facebook (TBC) started saying how brilliant it was and due to my severe case of FOMO I thought perhaps I should give it another go and picked it up again. BOY am I glad I did…. it was a book of two halves and the second story was absolutely brilliant. I finished the book in one sitting. My nerves were literally on edge and I didn’t know what was up and what was down at one stage but I knew I was gripped. A fabulous psychological thriller with brilliant characters, red herrings and all the usual twists and turns you would expect but never see coming!. The only reason I haven’t given this 5 stars as the first third was confusing.
About the Author: Pierre Lemaitre is a French novelist and screenwriter.