The Stranger in the Mirror
Liv Constantine
Harper
Fiction, Thriller
**+ (Bad/Okay)
DESCRIPTION: Two years ago, the woman who calls herself Addison Hope was found wandering by a New Jersey highway, bruised and scratched and with no memory before she found herself there. Taken in by kindly trucker Ed and his nurse wife Gigi, she has slowly built a new life in Philadelphia, but - aside from a talent for photography - she has no more clue who she was than ever. Now, she's engaged to Gabriel, son of a wealthy art family, and trying to move ahead... but she's afraid that, even as she looks toward a future, her past will return to destroy her. Judging by the scars on her body and the violent, terrifying flashbacks she sometimes glimpses, that past may be more horrific than she can handle.
Outside Boston, psychiatrist Julian has spent two years searching for his missing wife Cassandra. She was always a bit fragile after a traumatic upbringing, but he never expected her to just disappear, leaving behind both him and their young daughter Valentina - a daughter who asks every day when Mom is coming home and why she left. He's running out of answers to give her, but he can't give up the hope of finding his wife.
Meanwhile, Gabriel's mother can't help wondering about the strange girl Addison, a veritable ghost whose arrival disrupted a promising engagement for her well-meaning but sometimes too-softhearted son. She begins making some discreet inquiries, hoping to determine whether this woman is who, or what, she claims to be...
REVIEW: I figured I needed to vary the book diet a bit, and this thriller looked like a decent enough story (plus it was just long enough to fill a work day on audiobook). It started with some promise, albeit right from the gate it set "Addison" up as property to be claimed: she's at her engagement dinner with Gabriel, and simultaneously worries that she's stealing another woman's man (the former intended, Darcy, is also at the dinner) and that she has no idea if she's already someone else's wife. Meanwhile, Julian worries about his fragile lost wife who needs a man's protection (and a child's love) to justify her existence. Addison frets and worries and pokes at the holes in her memory (only to cringe back, often screaming, from what she glimpses in those holes), surrounded by a host of people who have bent their lives around her existence. The arrival of Julian seems to promise answers, but it's very quickly apparent to any reader with a remote sense of awareness (or has ever seen an episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent) that there's more to the relationship than meets the eye. What comes next is a drawn-out string of torment and potential gaslighting that further reduces the nominal heroine into the role of helpless victim in need of outside rescue. When the truth is revealed, it is done with such repetition and hammering home of the twisted, psychotic nature of the culprit as to induce both numbness and eye-rolling: yes, I get it, I totally understand what happened, I do not need the past umpteen years related in painstakingly slow detail to understand, give me a little credit here for being able to connect the dots. Then it drags itself out past the climax with yet more flashbacks into a history that, frankly, no longer really mattered with the main issues resolved; it was just padding by that point, and relating trauma just for the sake of relating trauma. By the time I finished, I had gone beyond merely feeling blandly disappointed into actively irked at how my time was wasted; the whole story could've been maybe half as long if it hadn't dawdled and wallowed in Addison's helpless misery and crippling self-doubt, not to mention how it endlessly repeated itself for the sake of the one or two readers who may not have figured things out the first ten times they were explained. Being actively irked is an automatic ratings ding, hence the drop below three stars.
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