#BlogTour-‘As Sick As Our Secrets’ by A.B Whelan

My thanks, once again to Anne Cater of Random Things, for having me along on the blogtour for ‘As Sick As Our Secrets’ by A.B Whelan-what a book!

About The Book….

Olivia Campbell has the life most women want. A respected husband, beautiful home, and the freedom that only financial security can provide.
But not all is as it appears…
Olivia has secrets, and after discovering a hidden journal in her husband’s study, she realizes that she’s not the only one.
As her picture perfect world starts to fall apart around her, Olivia wonders just how deep the secrets run as she finds herself immersed in the investigation of a young missing girl.

Some coincidences are just too hard to ignore, but how far is she willing to go to discover the truth?
Told from multiple perspectives, As Sick as Our Secrets is a dark, fast-paced thriller that delves into dark subject matters like addiction, murder, sexual violence, and danger. The story was inspired by an article about college girls soliciting their bodies to earn money for school. This book is not for the faint-hearted.

It begins with a retrospective,shocking act of violence, quickly followed by the modern day discovery of a woman’s scarf, the evidence that Olivia has been looking for to end her 10 year marriage.

‘As Sick As Our Secrets’ is absolutely not for the faint hearted-I would have to agree! Olivia and Richard would seem to be a power couple. He is a business man who manages a charity which supports abused women and children. They have it all…and yet…

Olivia has grown up after a traumatic childhood to replace her abusive parent with a gaslighting husband, a vile mother in law who can’t stand her and even her housekeeper is a complete bitch-you literally stare at the page in disbelief when you read they have been married so long and realise this is exactly what people say to abused women-‘Why did you stay?’

They never ask, ‘What stopped you from leaving?’ You are both witness and voyeur to what each of them has done to get where they are with a third narrator, Ashley, being the ballast between them.

Her tiny acts of rebellion such as spitting in his shoes, hiding a page from the very middle of a report and so on are the only measures of control she has over her life. So when she finds the evidence of aother woman, she looks a little further and finds that her husband might actually be the Fifty Shades killer who is terrorising their city. But who does she turn to when trapped in this sham of a marriage? And is she even right?

Olivia’s only friends are Ashley and Betty, they start to put the pieces together after one of Ashely’s patients goes missing and the answer may lie in what Olivia has found in her husband’s office.

What you have is a symbiotic relationship between a psychopathic man, raised by a psychopathic mother who continues to exert an unholy control on her adult son and his damaged wife. He presents a front, a part of which is his ‘successful’ marriage, but behind closed doors, who knows what goes on when each spouse has secrets that bind them together in a twisted, matrimonial dance?

There were things I had to go back and re-read in order to clarify plot points, the changing narratives mean you have to slow down and close read-speed reading or skimming is absolutely not an option.

The only bones I would have to pick is that, as a dyslexic and dyspraxic reader, the formatting of the book made it hard to read. The text was not formatted well, so the on the left hand of the page the sentences were parrallel but the right of the page was completely uneven and had a huge margin. The lines were very close together and the text took up only 1/2 the page so there was a massive, uneven gap to the right and it made it hard to read.

Otherwise, it was a really good read that kept me guessing!

About The Author….

A.B. Whelan resides in sunny Southern California with her family, among soccer fields, manicured lawns, and beautiful homes, where everybody’s life ‘seem’ perfect. Here is where she cooks up unique psychological thrillers that delve into suburbia life.

Twitter @AuthorABWhelan

@AnneCater

http://abwhelan.blogspot.com/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sick-Our-Secrets-psychological-thriller-ebook/dp/B079SK1ZB1