Twisty, smart and mind-blowing! I’m a fan of time travel and time jump books, so I was hooked just from the book description of a mother going back in time to try and prevent her son from committing a murder. Plus the mom is a lawyer like me! Sold.
Jen is the parent of teenaged son Todd. She happens to look out her window one night and sees, to her horror, Todd kill a stranger. Every parent’s worse nightmare. How could this be her life? What could have gone so terribly wrong? When she wakes the next morning, it is the day before the murder.
The plot is not exactly like ‘Groundhog’s Day’. There, the main character kept repeating the same day, over and over. In this book, the time travel is more like going backwards, further away from the horrible night when Todd kills a complete stranger. Jen must piece together a seemingly disconnected string of events and characters in order to try and stop the murder from happening, and hopefully saving her son in the process.
Jen has lots of working-mother guilt: did she spend enough time with her son? Did she miss out on important events in his life? She also gets to revisit her relationship with her lawyer father, who in present day has passed away. I will admit that some of the characters were tough to keep straight while listening to the audiobook, but I just rewound when I needed to. It all pays off in the end!
Jen uncovers more and more about her husband Kelly, her son, and her father. I enjoyed this aspect of the book. Can you ever really know someone close to you? The ending was mind-blowing and I am so glad I didn’t read any spoilers. Kudos to the author for putting a fresh spin on the thriller genre. I really enjoyed this book and recommend it to fans of sci-fi thrillers such as Blake Crouch’s books.
About the Book:
Can you stop a murder after it’s already happened?
Late October. After midnight. You’re waiting up for your seventeen-year-old son. He’s late. As you watch from the window, he emerges, and you realize he isn’t alone: he’s walking toward a man, and he’s armed.
You can’t believe it when you see him do it: your funny, happy teenage son, he kills a stranger, right there on the street outside your house. You don’t know who. You don’t know why. You only know your son is now in custody. His future shattered.
That night you fall asleep in despair. All is lost. Until you wake . . .
. . . and it is yesterday.
And then you wake again . . .
. . . and it is the day before yesterday.
Every morning you wake up a day earlier, another day before the murder. With another chance to stop it. Somewhere in the past lies an answer. The trigger for this crime—and you don’t have a choice but to find it . . .
