The Wicked Sister
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4.1 • 147 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
She thought she'd buried her past. But what if it's been hunting her this whole time?
From the bestselling and award-winning author of The Marsh King's Daughter comes a startling novel of psychological suspense as two generations of sisters try to unravel their tangled relationships between nature and nurture, guilt and betrayal, love and evil.
You have been cut off from society for fifteen years, shut away in a mental hospital in self-imposed exile as punishment for the terrible thing you did when you were a child.
But what if nothing about your past is as it seems?
And if you didn't accidentally shoot and kill your mother, then whoever did is still out there. Waiting for you.
For a decade and a half, Rachel Cunningham has chosen to lock herself away in a psychiatric facility, tortured by gaps in her memory and the certainty that she is responsible for her parents' deaths. But when she learns new details about their murders, Rachel returns, in a quest for answers, to the place where she once felt safest: her family's sprawling log cabin in the remote forests of Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
As Rachel begins to uncover what really happened on the day her parents were murdered, she learns--as her mother did years earlier--that home can be a place of unspeakable evil, and that the bond she shares with her sister might be the most poisonous of all.
Customer Reviews
Solid read
Two days and it was finished.
Chilling, page-turner, mind-bending
Trying to stay as spoiler free as possible. While hardly an original premise (evil child), the writing and characters are top notch. I am blown away at how well executed this book was - writing a character who has zero empathy, so callous is actually harder than one might imagine especially when you surround them with a loving, supportive family. Wow. Also super intense. Doubt I sleep tonight. And the knowledge of wilderness and nature made this even better. Levels. As an author, I read a ton and rarely leave reviews. Wicked Sister is fantastic.
Don’t Bother Reading (spoilers)
It’s hard to consider The Wicked Sister a mystery considering that the title is an obvious spoiler. The book is so predictable that I knew who had committed the murder within the first couple chapters (and also from just reading the title). Also, I’m tired of the amnesia tropes in thrillers; they’re neither clever nor entertaining and just come off as lazy writing. At the end of almost every chapter, the author tries to add a clever hook line or reveals new information that was remembered, but it only made me roll my eyes with how cliche and ineffectual it all was.
In The Wicked Sister’s final act it seems as though the author rushed to lazily put the last pieces of the puzzle together with a simple “oh yea i forgot about this specific detail because i have amnesia and i just happened to remembered it”, which is insulting as a reader who actually wasted their time actually finishing this unrewarding book.
A lot of reviewers mentioned that there was a lot of animal mutilation that upset them but I thought it was just a device to add shock value and it was actually one of the very few things to shock me in this book. It didn’t turn me away.
Oh yea and the protagonist can also talk to animals for some reason???? Why not?