Release date: November 19, 2024
Publisher: Harper
Genre: Mystery/Thriller
Synopsis:
A dazzling thriller about a young woman whose fabulously wealthy mother might be the victim of an elaborate con or might be losing her mind––and the daughter can’t tell where the truth lies.
Julie’s mother Kate is a force of nature––a glamorous woman of seventy, a self-made real estate developer, a grande dame in Florida society, and a power broker in Florida politics. It wasn’t easy for Julie to grow up in the shadow of such a dynamo, but she loves her mother, and she and her husband Eric are thrilled when Kate marries her long-lost high school sweetheart, a salt-of-the-earth man named Charlie.
But their storybook romance ends abruptly. On their wedding night, Kate calls the police in hysterics to report that Charlie just confessed to a notorious unsolved crime from decades before.
Charlie says she imagined it. Eric says that Kate has dementia. And the FBI says that Charlie couldn’t possibly have committed that crime.
Julie doesn’t know what to believe. Is her brilliant mother losing her mind? Or is sweet, lovable Charlie gaslighting Kate to gain control of her fortune?
As Julie tries to navigate through this maze of paranoia and mind games, cracks start to develop in her own marriage as it seems that Eric is keeping secrets . . .
Set against a backdrop of rampant development and devastating climate change, Shell Games is a psychological thriller that will make your head spin and the pages turn as you wonder exactly who is doing what to whom.
Review:
This one was wild! It’s gaslighting galore and as the reader you have no idea who to believe or what to think and I always enjoy that feeling when I’m reading a psychological thriller. The pacing was pretty fast and I read it in just a couple of sittings because I really wanted to know what would happen next. It’s definitely a huge guessing game with twists and turns, sometimes verging on outlandish but I had a lot of fun with it and some of the twists were really great. Julie is a bit of a frustrating character and hard to sympathize with at times but overall this was engaging and entertaining.
Overall rating: 3.75/5
Thanks to the publisher for my review copy.
Novelgossip 