Reviews with content warning for Gaslighting - The Stranger in Her House

*** A copy of this book was kindly provided to me by Netgalley and Thomas & Mercer in exchange for an honest review. Thank you! ***

WARNING: it's another unexpected unpopular opinion review!!

Wow. I still can't believe this happened to be honest... John Marrs is one of my favorite thriller authors, so I fully expected this newest story to be another winner. It's true that more domestic focused psychological thrillers don't usually work for me anymore, but I thought this particular story would be an exception because I always love whatever this author comes up with next. I guess I was wrong. Instead of adding a new favorite, this story mostly made me SO angry and frustrated that I wanted to throw my kindle against the wall. In fact, the only reason I kept reading was because I was curious just how much of a trainwreck it was going to be for me... Newsflash: the outcome wasn't good.

Don't get me wrong, I still love the premise and idea behind The Stranger In Her House. Part of me wonders if I was just in the wrong mood to properly enjoy this story, and the fact that more domestic thrillers just don't seem to work for me anymore probably didn't help either. BUT. This doesn't take away the fact that I struggled considerably to finish this story. Things technically should have improved for me once the plot reaches the second part, because the story takes a complete different direction once certain plot twists are revealed... But by then it was too late for me.

I think my negative reaction to this story has a lot to do with the cast of characters. The Stranger In Her House uses a multiple POV structure, but we mainly stay with Connie. To say that I didn't like her was an understatement, and that was even before the truth about her identity was revealed... Although it was pretty obvious there was something wrong about her from the beginning. I despised Paul from the start as well, and while I know that he is supposed to be unlikeable, it definitely didn't help improve my feelings for this story. Unlikeable characters aren't necessary a bad thing in thrillers, but in this case they really ruined the story for me.

I wasn't sure what to make of the plot structure either. Sure, the story is divided into parts, but they all had such a different vibe that it almost felt like reading three different stories at once. More domestic focused psychological thrillers aren't my thing anymore, so the first part highly frustrated me. Especially since it's SO obvious what Paul is doing and Connie is at the same time extremely unlikeable and impossible to warm up to, so I didn't particularly care. After certain reveals, things became more interesting without a doubt, but it kind of went way over the top way too fast and it just wasn't credible anymore. I don't mind suspending my disbelief when I'm enjoying a story, but in this case I couldn't convince my brain to do so. Probably thanks to the fact that I wasn't having a great time at all so far... And I honestly couldn't care less about what happened to any of them.

I can't deny that some of the twists were plenty clever, and as I've become used to with John Marrs, nothing is as it seems. Just when you think you know how everything ends, something else will pop up that will change everything... But between the extremely unlikeable characters, domestic vibe in the first part and lack of credibility in the rest of the plot, I just couldn't make myself to properly enjoy those twists. I'm still very much surprised by this reaction, because the majority of his books have received between 4.5 and 5 stars so far... But The Stranger In Her House was an outlier for me, and most definitely not my cup of tea. I seem to be in the minority though, so if you don't mind the issues I mentioned, the chances are high it will work better for you.

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