Tuesday, December 22, 2020

Behind the Red Door by Megan Collins

Behind the Red Door
by Megan Collins
Published August 4th 2020 by Atria Books

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. 


Review
4 Stars

Well-written, unique, and perfectly paced, Behind the Red Door is a tense suspense novel that had me staying up all night to get to the end. Fern, our unreliable narrator, has a childhood no one would ever envy and it has left her with some serious trauma. She helps children with difficulties in her line of work, but she fails to face her own anxiety and past. She covers it up and continues to starve for the attention from her father, a professor and fear researcher. When a trip home to help her father pack coincides with a major news event Fern realizes it may be her own memories that are suppressed and she may hold the key to helping locate a missing woman.

Behind the Red Door is the sort of book you just have to read, it's too easy to spoil. Megan Collins gives readers multiple unreliable characters, several plots, and a multi-faceted mystery that, despite guessing early on, had me turning pages as quick as I could. It's a smart thriller, it's clear Collins did her research to make it believable, and I really enjoyed the complexity of the psychological side of it. Twisted and atmosphere, this is the book for readers looking for a unique suspense read.


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