The Last House on Needless Street

I will probably simmer on this book and come back with some more coherent thoughts but right off the bat I do have this to say.

1. I flew through this book. Ward wrote in such a way that had me wanting to stay up way too late to finish.

2. The twist was... lackluster for me. Even if it went on the track that I was expecting it would still be completely unexpected and feel fresh. Possibly being shelved in my brain as one of those weird books. Instead it went more towards traditional tropes when it comes to thrillers. I know we can't reinvent the wheel HOWEVER it feels like a cope out to use the 'it's all in their head' trope.

Oh. My. God. This was absolutely terrifying and at the level of a Gone Girl and The Girl On The Train. I couldn't let go of this book and absolutely devoured it. The way the story is built is incredible and really superbly crafted, it made me go through a whole range of emotions. And the end was absolutely masterful! For anyone looking for a thrill I couldn't recommend this book more.

Brilliant! It's very difficult to give a synopsis or even a review of this book for fear of spoiling it, but I'll simply say that this book is genuinely full of twists and turns. It's creepy, thrilling, and more! Probably the best book I've read this year so far. Amazing! Mysterious, creepy, and intriguing. 5/5 Stars, READ IT!

This book

This is the best thriller I've read in years, one of those books that keeps you turning and turning the pages, following the trails and traps the author has set out for you with a tremendous sense of building unease. It's impossible to describe without spoilers, but the setup is that a little girl went missing at the beach some years before. Her older sister, driven by guilt and trauma, has never let go of the case and had been conducting her own investigation, which has led her to a man named Ted. She begins to live in the house next door to Ted's and continues her investigation...oh, and there's a talking cat involved. It's cleverly plotted, with little snippets of information being doled out at precisely the right times to keep you off balance and make you reassess what you'd thought was going on up to then. All the characters in the book are orbiting a core of darkness, a hole in the world where something is very very wrong, but the nature of that wrong doesn't come into focus until the end. There's one scene in particular, maybe two thirds of the way through, where it will only dawn on you much later what was really going on, and the lurch in perspective that realisation brings is emblematic of this twisty, turny, unputdownable novel.