The Break-In
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4.2 • 53 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
After killing an intruder in self-defense, a wealthy London mother must unravel a terrifying mystery filled with twists and turns, from the author of the “deliciously twisted thriller” (People) The Other Mothers.
Alice, a professional mother of one, is hosting a playdate with friends at her upscale London home when a disturbed man breaks in. With her child in the next room, Alice panics and kills him—an act later ruled to have been in self-defense.
Everyone tries to encourage Alice to move on with her life—but with strange comments appearing online, a mysterious phone call telling her all is not as it seems, and her husband, nanny, and friends behaving strangely, Alice finds herself drawn to the mystery of who her intruder really was. As she digs deeper, she discovers a trail of dark secrets that spiral closer to home than she ever could have imagined.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Faulkner's ho-hum latest (after The Other Mothers) focuses on the fallout after stay-at-home London mom Alice Rathbone kills a home invader. When knife-wielding teenager Ezra Jones breaks into her house while her seven-year-old daughter, Martha, is having a playdate, Alice bludgeons him over the head with a stool and kills him. At first, she assumes it was a random attack, but after talking to Ezra's mother, she suspects the teen had been stalking her family. Alice turns to her new friend Stella, an investigative journalist, for help getting to the bottom of the situation. Then Alice's husband, Jamie, disappears, reigniting dormant rumors that he'd been involved in sex scandals—and possibly even murder—as a senior executive at a charity organization. Eventually, Faulkner knits everything together with a series of surprising reveals, unveiling hidden motives and unlikely links between her characters. She gets in her own way, however, with too much plodding exposition and characterizations too thin to earn readers' investment. It's a letdown.
