Friday Focus: The Friday 56 and Book Beginnings

It's Friday . . . time to share book excerpts with:

• Book Beginnings on Fridays hosted by Rose City Reader, where bloggers share the first sentence or more of a current read, as well as initial thoughts about the sentence(s), impressions of the book, or anything else that the opening inspires.  
• The Friday 56 hosted by Freda's Voice, where you grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

Today I'm featuring a recent read, Behind the Red Door by Megan Collins. The excerpts shared are from a hardcover version borrowed from the library. 

 

  

Beginning:  one

Now that it's summer, it's not my job to protect the children. 

 

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Page 56:  I'd only been thinking of her.  But I didn't tell her these things.  And for her part, she didn't divulge her feelings either.  But we knew.

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My thoughts:  Fern is called back to New Hampshire to help her dad Ted, a recently retired psychology professor, pack up her childhood home in advance of his move to Florida. Fern's relationship with her father and artist mother Mara has never been particularly warm and loving, so she is ambivalent about returning. As she faces memories of her neglectful childhood, a kidnapping from twenty years ago resurfaces and captures her attention. Fern feels an exceptional and seemingly inexplicable connection to the case, and begins to have frequent dreams related to the crime. She comes to believe she may have key information buried deep in her subconscious not only related to Astrid's long-ago kidnapping, but to Astrid's very recent disappearance without a trace.

Behind the Red Door is a taut psychological thriller in which the protagonist must confront a lifetime of lies, fear, and dark secrets to make sense of the past and move toward a more secure and promising future. Plentiful twists, turns, and dilemmas make this an unputdownable novel.

 

 

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From Goodreads:  The author of the “suspenseful, atmospheric, and completely riveting” (Megan Miranda, New York Times bestselling author) debut The Winter Sister returns with a darkly thrilling novel about a woman who comes to believe that she has a connection to a decades old kidnapping and now that the victim has gone missing again, begins a frantic search to learn what happened in the past.

When Fern Douglas sees the news about Astrid Sullivan, a thirty-four-year-old missing woman from Maine, she is positive that she knows her. Fern’s husband is sure it’s because of Astrid’s famous kidnapping—and equally famous return—twenty years ago, but Fern has no memory of that, even though it happened an hour outside her New Hampshire hometown. And when Astrid appears in Fern’s recurring nightmare, one in which a girl reaches out to her, pleading, Fern fears that it’s not a dream at all, but a memory.

Back home in New Hampshire, Fern purchases a copy of Astrid’s recently published memoir—which may have provoked her original kidnapper to abduct her again—and as she reads through its chapters and visits the people and places within it, she discovers more evidence that she has an unsettling connection to the missing woman. As Fern’s search becomes increasingly desperate, she hopes to remember her past so she can save Astrid in the present…before it’s too late.

Featuring Megan Collins’s signature “dark, tense, and completely absorbing” (Booklist) prose and plenty of shocking twists and turns, Behind the Red Door is an arresting thriller that will haunt you long after you turn the last page.

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This Friday Focus: The Friday 56 & Book Beginnings post was originally composed and/or compiled and published by Catherine for the blog, bookclublibrarian.com.  It cannot be republished without attribution.