My Rating: 3.5 stars
Last year, while searching for a book to complete an A to Z Author challenge I was doing, I came across author Lisa Unger's latest psychological suspense novel The Red Hunter, which ended up being a thrill-ride of a book that I enjoyed from beginning to end and found very difficult to put down. Not surprisingly, when I heard that Unger would have a new book out this year, another psychologicaI suspense thriller entitled Under My Skin, I jumped at the opportunity to read an advance copy.
The story revolves around Poppy Lang, whose husband Jack was brutally murdered a year ago, and even though on the surface it appears that she has moved on with her life, underneath she is actually still traumatized and broken, unable to return to the "normalcy" she had once known. Still haunted by the mysterious circumstances of her husband's death as well as the few days immediately afterward when she herself disappeared, only to resurface later completely confused with no memory of where she had been or what had happened, Poppy begins to dive deeper and deeper into a life of chaos and confusion. She starts to experience blackouts, moments where she would be lucid one minute but then completely lost the next minute, with things worsening as she dives deeper into a darkness where she is no longer able to distinguish between what is real and what is imaginary. The only thing that keeps her grounded is the insistence on finding out the truth about her husband's death while also attempting to dig up memories of those lost few days.
This book was a bit of a maze, with quite a few twists and turns as well as a couple red herrings thrown in to mix things up a little. Out of the many books in this particular genre that I've read in recent months, I would have to say that this one comes closest to what I would consider a "true" psychological thriller / suspense novel – Poppy's constantly confused psychological state, the concept of dreams versus reality scattered throughout the story, complex characters who all seemed to have another side to them that no one else is able to see, endless mind games and twists, etc. All of this, coupled with the fact that the narrative is told entirely from Poppy's first person perspective, lent the story a bit of a chaotic, slightly disjointed feel, which I will admit bothered me a little at first – the jumping back and forth between past and present, the difficulty in distinguishing between events that actually happened versus those imagined by Poppy in her confused state of mind, etc. – this made the story slightly difficult to follow at times. It wasn't until I finished the book that I realized perhaps the story was structured this way intentionally to better flush out Poppy's character and her mindset.
Overall, I did like this one, as it was well-written and both the story as well as the characters were interesting, however compared to Unger's previous book that I had read, I didn't seem to connect with this one as much. I felt like there was a bit of repetitiveness in some parts which dragged the plot a little, especially in the middle section of the book, to the point that when I actually did have to put the book down in order to attend to personal matters, I didn't feel the pull of urgently wanting to get back to reading. Perhaps I had different expectations going into this one given that the previous book of hers I had read was so good….or perhaps I'm just burned out with psychological thrillers given how many I've read over the past few months. With that said though, I would still recommend this one, as it's definitely highly readable, but if this is your first time reading a Lisa Unger novel, I would say start with her previous ones first. For me, I still intend on reading her other works, it's just finding the time to get to them…
Received ARC from Park Row via Edelweiss
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