If You Were Here
A Novel of Suspense
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4.1 • 265 Ratings
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
From New York Times bestselling author Alafair Burke comes a suspenseful, tightly plotted story of friendship, lies, and betrayal.
Journalist McKenna Jordan is chasing the latest urban folktale—the story of an unidentified woman who heroically pulled a teenaged boy from the subway tracks, seconds before the approach of an oncoming train. When McKenna locates a video snippet that purportedly captures the incident, she thinks she has an edge on the competition scrambling to identify the mystery heroine.
McKenna is shocked to discover that the woman in the video bears a strong resemblance to Susan Hauptmann, a close friend—and a classmate of her husband’s at West Point—who vanished without a trace ten years earlier. The NYPD concluded that the nomadic Susan—forced by her father into an early military life, floundering as an adult for a fixed identity—simply started over again somewhere else.
But McKenna has always believed the truth went deeper than the police investigation ever reached. What might have been a short-lived metro story sends her on a twisting search that leads across New York City—and to dark secrets buried dangerously close to home…
Customer Reviews
Better than most
I read a lot of this genre and they all begin to sound the same: family secrets, betrayal, nothing is as it seems, etc.. This novel held my attention however: strong yet flawed characters, unexpected plot twists, interesting exposure of weak legal procedures.
Slooooow
This book was overall great but the hardest to get into. Too much going on all at once in the first half but the end you get a nice big bow to tie all of it together.
Loved it, loved it...
I forced myself to pace. I didn't want to finish the book too quickly - when finished, then what - on to start crappy novel?
No - this is a book to savor. To get caught up in the melancholy of losing a close friend all those years ago. The title alone sets the stage for a real heart breaker.
But then the ending. A twist here, a twist there - frankly, I would have loved it more had there been less twists. It became a little too contrived for me - I kept thinking of those TV infomercials - "But wait - there's more!"
It did not need to be tied up in such a perfect bow.