Hello, Fellow Book Worms and Book Dragons!
Shari Lapena surprised me with An Unwanted Guest and thrilled me with the Couple Next Door. I thoroughly enjoyed her novels, and was looking forward to reading more of her works. Unfortunately I was not as enamored with this book as I was with the others.
A Stranger in the House is Shari Lapena's second novel, and it is published by Viking Press, and imprint of Penguin Random House. In it we are introduced to Karen Krupp, a suburban housewife on the run from a terrifying incident that causes her to run her car into a pole. When her husband Tom arrives at the hospital, he sees that Karen has amnesia. The doctors are confident that Karen's memory will return. But for now she has to deal with a charge of reckless driving. Across town the body of a well dressed man is found by teenagers in an abandoned restaurant. Detective Rasbach (returning from his work in the Couple Next Door) begins to piece together the events that led up to the murder. The murder weapon is missing, as are some of the man's personal belongings. Rasbach also has a pair of rubber gloves with a tire track on them. A track that matches a car that crashed into a pole the same night just down the road.
Karen recuperates with the help of her husband and best friend, neighbor Brigid Cruikshank. Her memories are muddied and only serve snap shots of what happened prior to the crash. This is but a small part of her worries, because someone has been in her home. She begins to notices subtle changes in her home, such as objects moved. Who is entering the Krupp's home while they are out? As the break-ins continue, Detective Rasbach begins to question why Karen had an accident in the same neighborhood as a murder. She panics, not knowing why she had been there. Is Karen somehow connected to the dead man in the restaurant? As Rasbach's investigation increases, Karen's memories are returning. Just what does she remember? And how did she manage to crash her car a few miles away from a homicide?
A Stranger in the House had a very good foundation that it was based on. I did enjoy the mix of mystery and suspense, but for me this book fell a little flat. Having read two solid novels by Lapena, this seemed to be a step down from their stories. I found myself not liking Tom Krupp at all. He was whiny and needy and seemed to constantly make mistakes. Karen was easier to read and she did carry a majority of the book. However her personality seemed off in the end and some of her decisions did not mesh. Brigid was just annoying and needed the door slammed in her face more than she did. She was always being nosy and meddling in the Krupp's lives. The only character I enjoyed was Detective Rasbach. He was the sanity of this book, making the most sense. The over-all mystery was good, but I felt I had seen this story elsewhere and done better.
The audio book was read by actress, Tavia Gilbert. I loved her work on Two Girls Down, and she takes that same brand of intense presentation to this story. She made this reading experience better, and her voice acting had me thinking she had company reading. Excellent job.
In the end A Stranger in the House read like a book or movie that I had witnessed before. The characters were hard to like and the twist at the end did not surprise me. I gave this novel three stars.
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