4 Gripping and Suspenseful Stars for The Night Olivia Fell

Abi Knight got the middle of the night phone call no parent wants to receive - "This is Portage Point Hospital. It's about your daughter, Olivia. I'm afraid there's been an accident."

Abi rushes to the hospital to be faced with terrible news. Olivia was found at the bottom of an embankment near ZigZag bridge. She sustained severe head trauma and permanent and irreversible brain damage. Her little girl was gone. Could there be anything worse?

Abi is shocked to learn that there is more. Olivia had secrets that she can not fathom. Her teenage daughter in all essence lay dead in a hospital bed, surrounded by bags and pumps breathing for her. Not because there was any chance of waking her up, it was solely to give the baby she was carrying a chance at survival. Faced with insurmountable grief, shock and emotion Abi reaches for her daughter's hand and notices something wrong. The silver charm bracelet Olivia always wore was gone. In it's place were finger mark like bruises.

Abi tries to make sense of the situation when things simply don't add up. In her heart she knows someone hurt Olivia. Yet the local police seem more than willing to brush it off and rule it an accident. Needing to know what really happened the night Olivia fell, she begins to unravel the secrets of her daughter's life trying to piece together what happened that night herself.

The story unfolds via two alternating point of views - that of Abi in the present and flashbacks of Olivia's past. I couldn't help but get pulled in by Abi's pain and grief and her desire to protect her child, even in death. The more Abi searches the more secrets she is faced with, including those from her own past which she has tried desperately to hide.

The mother-daughter relationship was very well developed. We get to see it from both Abi and Olivia's point of view and it definitely tugged at my heartstrings. I felt for Olivia whose life was cut short when there was so much ahead of her. Although I figured out what happened to Olivia it didn't take anything away from how I felt about the story. For me, it was a plausible and well developed scenario - not something that came out of left field. The ending left me feeling both sad and content and definitely looking forward to more from Christina McDonald.

Thank you Christina McDonald, Gallery Books and NetGalley for an arc of this book in exchange for my honest review.