I found several reviews that criticized the first half of the book for being slow and dull before picking up at the second half - but it was actually the exact opposite for me. I absolutely devoured the first 200 pages! There was this mystery I could sink my teeth into, this sinister overtone with the unknown dropped calls and a threatening text, and the desire to know more. Who is Eddie? Why did he disappear? What happened? Oh, the urge to look ahead was so strong and kept me going!

Unfortunately, the second half... the mystery is resolved with a good portion of the book still left. Granted, the initial plot twist did catch me by surprise, I personally did not see it coming, though it certainly left me with some more questions - but from that point on, about perhaps 150 pages left and it just seems to become a whole different book, a whole new vibe. There seemed a rush to get this couple from this point and to their Happily Ever After, and it was packed with twists and herrings that felt arbitrary, explanations for earlier mysteries that felt anticlimactic, and all in all... just a little unnecessary.

I don’t really know what ending I had hoped for or expected, but I had such a good time with the thriller portion of the book and had such difficulty with the whole standard romance of the ending. Plus there are a number of side characters and every single one of them gets their own personal drama on top of it, which I imagine was the author’s method of humanizing them and fleshing them out, or perhaps a way of making clear that everybody does have something going on and sometimes they all happen at once and not when convenient? but ultimately resulted in a bunch of background cardboard and a lot of knotted threads that didn’t really need to be there, none of it tied to the main story in any way, they were JUST random background plot points.

Overall I didn’t haaate the book or even necessarily the ending, though I was let down by it. It just starts off built up as one thing and turns drastically into another.