GENRE: Fiction/Contemporary Thriller
SETTING: New York, USA
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: B
SYNOPSIS: Seeking women ages 18 - 32 to participate in a study on ethics and morality. Generous compensation. Anonymity guaranteed.
When Jessica Farris signs up for a psychology study conducted by the mysterious Dr. Shields, she thinks all she’ll have to do is answer a few questions, collect her money, and leave. But as the questions grow more and more intense and invasive and the sessions become outings where Jess is told what to wear and how to act, she begins to feel as though Dr. Shields may know what she’s thinking…and what she’s hiding. As Jess’s paranoia grows, it becomes clear that she can no longer trust what in her life is real, and what is one of Dr. Shields’ manipulative experiments. Caught in a web of deceit and jealousy, Jess quickly learns that some obsessions can be deadly.
MY THOUGHTS: This was good, different and interesting. The plot is about a doctor trying to get information on certain women so they can use it against them. I didn't get bored at all but thought a few unimportant scenes could have been left out, making the book a little shorter in length. The entire plot had a steady pace and there were really no peaks and valleys, even at the end, which fell a little flat. I wish it had been more suspenseful. The story is told from the alternating narration of both Jessica and Dr. Shields. The story spans just under six weeks, then the epilogue takes place three months later. There's three main characters and none are really likable and two are about ten years older than the main character.
Jessica's twenty-eight and a makeup artist. She's from Pennsylvania but moved to New York after college. She's not the most moral of people and I can't imagine any readers were rooting for her. I really don't like her harboring guilt over something from her childhood that's truly not her fault. Honestly, I don't know why that was put into the story, or the incident with a male theater actor years before, that's mentioned again in the epilogue. Or why her parents had to be in the story at all. Someone involves them in their scheme but why? Why? It just did nothing for the story.
The negatives: There's an abundance of brand name products, celebrities, and television shows mentioned, so much that it irritated me badly, and it started just a few pages in. If I had to put a number on it, I'd say at least twenty-five to thirty names were mentioned. A second negative is that two of the three characters are underdeveloped with no background information on them. How you can write a villain and not tell us about their childhood and everything leading up to the bad things they do if beyond me.
I'm also confused by the very last page, with someone wanting a lot of something from someone else and why they think the other person would give it. I don't understand what that person was thinking or why they were still in contact with the other person.
I received this from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
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