I REALLY loved just about everything about this book up until the actual "mystery" came into play. There was a point where the story became less about Reeve, her recovery, and her helping the other girls to recover and more about the author moving through the typical thriller paces with Reeve magically overcoming her six year, crippling psychological issues with little repercussions in way of her mental health.

I will especially say, avoid the audiobook if you can. The narrator would practically whisper at points so you'd have to crank up the volume to hear her then yell the next second so your ears get blasted off.

**SPOILERS**

I especially did not like the entire final show down (I mean, I didn't like a lot of what led up to the final show down either, but I was willing to forgive all that as debut novel endings are hard so I'm going to wrap everything up with a neat little bow, corny dialogue and all, syndrome). It wasn't realistic for the Reeve that I followed through the entire rest of the book to fall for such an obvious ploy so easily and then jump into action so level headed without a single instance of real, true, PTSD kind of panic.

I realize what I'm about to say is a nitpick, but I feel it's proof of the degree to which this entire ending felt unrealistic and frustrating: after waking up nude and cuffed to a bed, escaping said cuffs, then making and enacting a plan to get out, Reeve decides there's "no time to get dressed."

............Woman.

You're not in Victorian England. It takes 5 seconds to pull on jeans and less to pull on a shirt. You're escaping a sexual sadist, not looking cute for a date. Not to mention, it's stated on multiple occasions that Reeve is uncomfortable with being nude in even a consensual manner. It's hard for me to imagine that someone like her (or anyone in this situation for that matter) would come up with a plan to escape before taking a few seconds to put her clothes on especially since her captor LEFT HER CLOTHES IN THE ROOM WITH HER. Hell, you can get dressed AND devise a plan at the same time. The author has told me numerous times how super smart you are. Multitask, damn it.

Like I said, I recognize that it's a nitpick, but by the time I got to that line I was already so absolutely frustrated with how simultaneously unrealistic and prototypical everything that was happening was that I just couldn't take it anymore.

And this was made even worse, I think, because the beginning had so much promise. I would have loved to read a book that was about a survivor's recovery and seeing her guide others through their own while proving to herself that those six years of hard work were worth it and that she was ready to take the next step forward, but unfortunately the "mystery" had to go and get in the way.

(Also, there was literally no point to the character of Poe. I kept waiting for him to do something that the other characters couldn't have done themselves. It didn't help that, because of the way the first chapter was written, I thought for most of the book that he and Duke were the same person.)