About the Book:
Have you ever been wrong about someone?
Juno was wrong about Winnie Crouch.
Before moving in with the Crouch family, Juno thought Winnie and her husband, Nigel, had the perfect marriage, the perfect son—the perfect life. Only now that she’s living in their beautiful house, she sees the cracks in the crumbling facade are too deep to ignore.
Still, she isn’t one to judge. After her grim diagnosis, the retired therapist simply wants a place to live out the rest of her days in peace. But that peace is shattered the day Juno overhears a chilling conversation between Winnie and Nigel…
She shouldn’t get involved.
She really shouldn’t.
But this could be her chance to make a few things right.
Because if you thought Juno didn’t have a secret of her own, then you were wrong about her, too.
From the wickedly dark mind of bestselling author Tarryn Fisher, The Wrong Family is a taut new thriller that’s riddled with twists in all the right places.
My Review:
Tarryn Fisher remains one of my favorite authors but this book just felt very different from her other books. The character development fell short for me so I was not invested in their actions at all. Winnie, Nigel and Juno did not hold much interest for me so by the ending, I did not really care about them as I should have. I also felt that the mental illness of Dakota, Winnie’s brother, was merely a plot device thrown in and not as fully developed as it could have been.
This book is told from two points of view and has an almost Parasite-like feel to it. Winnie is a mother to a young teenager who seems to have a terrible marriage. I am not quite sure what her motivation was throughout this story. Then we have Juno, who is a former therapist, living secretly in Winnie and Nigel’s home. It seems very unlikely that a stranger can go undetected in this era of Ring and Nest home security systems but there you have it.
Juno feels she must intervene in Winnie’s domestic situation before things get too out of hand. What ensues is a wild, violent and unpredictable story that just was not fleshed out enough for me. While I love a good domestic thriller, the violence felt heavy-handed and the plot twists just seemed too far-fetched for me. Sadly, ‘The Wrong Family’ was a miss for me.
(Thank you to the publisher for providing an advanced copy of this book in return for an honest review. All opinions are my own.)
