Before We Met

by Lucie Whitehouse

[Leah]

When I spotted Lucie Whitehouse’s third novel Before We Met on NetGalley, I thought it sounded really intriguing. Intriguing enough for me to request it, and download it to my Kindle as soon as I was accepted for it. I haven’t read any of Lucie’s books, this was my first foray into her work, and sadly, I’m sort of disappointed. I liked the idea of the novel, I liked the premise, but I felt it was quite poorly executed. It seems that the success of Gone Girl has meant that publishers have decided that thrillers are the new “it” novel. I haven’t read Gone Girl myself, though it is on my shelf to be read at some point, but I hope it is better than Before We Met.

Before We Met has a relatively simple premise, at least at the beginning. Hannah and Mark married after a bit of a whirlwind relationship and she’s moved her life from New York to London to be with him. But when he doesn’t come home from his trip to New York, Hannah starts to worry about where he is and what he’s doing. She begins to dig into his life, even going so far as to visit his office to go through his paperwork, and what she finds shocks her. He’s took her money out of her bank account and put it into his own, without a word and all of his work colleagues think he should be in Rome with Hannah, on a romantic weekend vacation. As Hannah discovers more and more secrets, she begins to wonder just who the man she married really is…

I was initially really interested in Before We Met when I started it, but the novel just didn’t hold my interest. I found myself a bit bored. Surely a thriller should be gripping, should pretty much mean I’m on the edge of my seat the entire time, terrified of what’s going to happen? But this was a bit boring. The initial mystery behind Mark’s disappearance was interesting, but I couldn’t understand why Hannah didn’t contact the police, or someone, when she found her money was missing. Surely the bank would have had to authorise a movement of almost £50k? I just felt Hannah wasn’t all that bothered about what Mark was really doing and where he really was. I wanted more urgency from her, not to just lay about their house thinking about what could have happened.

As the novel drew to a close, it did pick up the pace, but by that point I’d actually figured out the entire thing. Unfortunately. That actually sucked. I love a thriller that shocks the life out of me, with the truth, but this one was super obvious. Either that, or I’m really good at figuring out plot twists, and that’s not normally true. I was really disappointed, I really wanted to enjoy Before We Met, I really wanted it to blow me away because thrillers are so popular at the moment and if you do it right, it can be amazing. But, sadly, this one didn’t work for me. The novel will have its fans, I just wanted a bit more oomph from this thriller, and I just found the action came way too late. If the whole novel had gone at the pace those last few pages did, it would have been a hundred times better, but sadly not.