What You Left Behind by Samantha Hayes

What You Left Behind is the second book by Samantha Hayes. I was really excited to read this book after reading the book description. I love a good suspenseful thriller. I’ll admit, I have never heard of Samantha Hayes before or her previous book, Until You’re Mine. But something about her words intrigued me. 

Amazon Description:

Two years after a terrifying spate of teenage suicides, the remote village of Radcote has just begun to heal. Then a young man is killed in a freak motorcycle accident and a suicide note is found among his belongings. When a second boy is found dead shortly thereafter, the nightmare of repeat suicides once again threatens the community.

      Desperate for a vacation, Detective Inspector Lorraine Fisher has just come to Radcote for a stay with her sister, Jo, but the atmosphere of the country house is unusually tense. Freddie, Jo’s son, seems troubled and uncommunicative, and Jo is struggling to reach out to him. Meanwhile, Lorraine becomes determined to discover the truth behind these deaths. Are they suicides, or is there something more sinister at work? Finding answers might help Freddie, but they’ll also lead to a shocking truth: whatever it is–or whoever it is–that’s killing these young people is far more disturbing than she ever could have imagined, and unraveling the secret is just as dangerous as the secret itself.

My Thoughts:

For those of you who are my FB friends, you noticed that over the weekend I had a power outage. Earlier in the week we had a strange storm that lasted a whopping 5 minutes; just long enough to damage the giant oak tree in my backyard and have half of it fall on my house. Well..my garage. My garage where my car is. My husband was away for the weekend and I was stuck; with no car. So when the power went out during another splash of rain a few days later, I thought for sure it was due to the large tree. When I went to go check, I noticed that the large tree had obviously caused some roof damage as my ceiling was cracking and falling apart in the garage. All I could do is pray that it didn’t cave in and nothing crushed my car – I havent even had that new car for a year!

Since I had nothing else to do I decided to open the curtains (this is the only time I praise having giant window that takes up the whole wall in the living room) and started to read.

I read.

And I read some more.

For me it was a very quick read. While it had a lot of turns and twists to keep you going, it doesn’t take long for you to figure things out.

One thing that bugs me most about books is when they write in the inside that this is a work which you won’t be able to figure out. Just when you think you do, it changes. Well, that almost always is a lie. It also gives the reader the sense of knowing whoever they think it is – it’s not. Part of that is a classic writer psych out. Nothing like a little reverse psychology to get your brain going. Only in this case, I don’t think it did any good.

Having said that, the book was still really good. It was interesting to see the story unfold – or shall I say stories. The truth is, there is so much going on here that you actually have a few stories woven in that find themselves crashing in to each other. It does make for a lot of great twists.

If you are a mystery thriller fan, I do recommend you pick this one up.

I enjoyed it enough that I am considering picking up her previous book.

One thing left to point out, the author is from the UK and that is where the book was previously published. There are a lot of non-American slang words and such. It shouldn’t cause you any difficulty figuring out what she means though. I think it makes the book that much  more fun to read.

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Disclosure: I was given this book to read for free from a book review program in exchange for my honest review. I am not being compensated for this post. All opinions are 100% my own. However, the links are Amazon links. Should you follow the link and make a purchase I’ll make a few cents.