Alice has found a good looking man on the beach, and she’s brought him home. See what I’ve found! With just this much information, I am immediately engaged, wanting to have a conversation with this woman about risks, about dangers. For heaven’s sake, what about your kids? Friends, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Lisa Jewell’s hot new novel goes on sale April 25, 2017. I read mine free and early, thanks to Net Galley and Atria Books in exchange for an honest review.

The level of suspense is heightened by shifting points of view. We have the man himself, who has amnesia and doesn’t know his name. Alice has her children name him, and they decide to call him Frank. Her teenage daughter Jasmine rolls her eyes, and I want to grab Alice and say, “Oh no you didn’t!” But since I can’t do that, I read on instead.

Frank has nightmares and we are privy to them, as well as the fragments of memory that come home to him in shards and fragments, bit by bit.

We also have two other, separate story lines. One is that of Lily Monrose, whose husband Carl has vanished. She is just twenty-one years old and came with him to UK from Kiev. He showered her with affection and gifts, found them a home, set up housekeeping, and one day, he failed to return from work. What the heck?

And then we have a vacationing family with a narrative set in the past, featuring teenage siblings Kirsty and Gray, who fall into bad company one summer.

Naturally we wonder from the get-go how these disparate elements will come together at the end of the book. Is Frank really Carl? Is Carl really Gray? Is Frank…well, you see what I mean.

The thing that I love about Jewell’s work is that her dynamic characters are always women, and she develops them well. Alice isn’t always a lovable character; her impulse control and judgment are less than stellar. She tells Frank at the outset:

“I’m not the most together person in the world and it doesn’t take much to make all the wheels fall off.”

She promises her friend Derry, who has seen her through some dark times that were partly due to her own terrible instincts, that she is letting Frank stay in the mother-in-law apartment in back of her home. It has a separate entrance; she will lock the door to her home, and it will just be for one night. But then, the dog likes Frank, and so she takes down the safeguards—the locked door, the one night, the keeping him in a separate place from her family—in breathtakingly swift succession, and I am with Derry, who asks Alice to remember what happened before.

Before what? I turn the pages a little faster.

Meanwhile, the police are way too slow in trying to help Lily, who is isolated in her exurban apartment; she is frantic. Her mother wants her to stop looking for Carl and come home, and it sounds like a smart idea to me, but then I have never lived in Kiev, so who knows? The longer Carl is gone, and the more we learn about him, the more I want to take Lily to the airport. Fly away little bird, there’s nothing that is good for you here!

The hardest buy-in for me is at the beginning, because really, people don’t just get amnesia. Not from car accidents, not from shocking experiences, not from anything. It’s almost unheard of, the stuff of bad old movies. But a good author can sell anybody anything, and I want to know what happens next, so I tell myself, fine then. Amnesia it is. And the way the rest of it unfurls is fascinating. Flawed but appealing, believable characters combined with strong pacing make this addictive novel the one you want at the vacation cabin, the beach, or just for a rainy weekend curled up in your favorite chair.

Recommended to those that love good fiction.