Hardcover, 416 pages
Published
August 7th 2012
by Kensington
Genre: suspense novel, mystery, thriller
Rating: 5 stars
Ava Garrison is a fractured and grieving
woman. It’s been two years since her two year old son Noah mysteriously vanished
from her house on Church Island, off the Washington coast. With no ransom ever requested and no corpse
ever found, police investigations had ended in a blind alley of volatile clues without offering any hope of
closure, the kidnapping lead abandoned in favor of a most certain accidental death. Almost likely the little boy had wandered off
the house, reached the docks and found his death in the cold waters. The loss and lack of closure had apparently been too much to handle, even for a once self-driven, successful and ruthless
business woman like Ava. What’s left of that dynamo of business savvy and sex-appeal
is a woman tormented by guilt, pills-induced
hallucinations, and a huge mental/emotional block that is preventing her from
discerning dreams and blurred memories from reality. The collusive and secretive attitude of her very husband,
family members and household staff, will trap her in a state of unknowing and
unmistakable feeling of being framed in an artfully orchestrated conspiracy to
send her back in a mental institution.
After spending some time in a
hospital under psychiatric ward, Ava returns to her estate only to find that
her world is crumbling down. Her
ancestral home, once her safe haven, now feels like a gloomy prison, her family
members act more like enemies than supporters, her husband is more and more
disconnected, fueling her suspicions that her already languishing marriage is just heading
toward a bitter divorce. Heavily medicated and monitored at home by a
psychiatrist hired by her husband, Ava experiences huge memory gaps and recurrent nightmares about that night when
her son went missing: she doesn’t clearly recollect the circumstances of her
son’s disappearance and, despite the telling scars on her wrists, she doesn’t
even remember ever attempting suicide. Her dreams are so vivid that they start
blending with her unfocused perception of reality, a perception made even more distorted
by the use of medications. When she
decides to interrupt her psychiatric therapy and she wisely stops using tranquilizers
and anti-depressants, her mind breaks
through the fog and gets a hold of a thread that will lead her (through
unimaginable twist-and-turns and unfathomable discoveries about her family and
friends) to the truth about her son’s disappearance. Help will come from Austin
Dern, a mysterious handyman hired by her husband to take care of the estate , a
complete stranger but ironically the only person on the island Ava can really
trust.
In this intense, pulse-racing suspense novel, prolific author Lisa
Jackson had me at the prologue. The initial pages are emotionally charged and really
set the tone for the entire book: the heart-wrenching description of Ava’s “deep
seated and painful grief”, her feelings of helplessness and guilt, in addition
to the anguished replaying of that terrible tragedy in her nightmares, pierced
through my heart and immediately propelled me in Ava’s personal hell. I am a
mother and I can easily relate to her emotional trial. What I found endearing
about this character is also the way her traumatic experience redefines her
personality without crashing her headstrong core and unyielding hope. The
tragedy stirs Ava’s life from a
torturing pattern of self-doubt to a path of clarity and disambiguation, where
several veils will drop on the real substance of her family and friendship relations.
Lisa Jackson’s descriptive style
gives true dimension to every scene: you
will always have a clear and seamless sense of space and time. The narration is
richly textured and pleasantly complex: switching now and then on a double chronological time line, between the
present path to recovery and the flashbacks from the past, the
author’s use of interior monologues and
introspective point of view for some of the main characters provide the reader
with a front seat view in Ava’s and Dern’s emotional worlds, without spoiling the mystery factor and the
suspenseful effect. Well into the second
half of the book, in fact, not only Dern’s true identity and real mission at Ava’s estate
are still shrouded in a mystery as thick as the fogs enveloping Church Island; I
am so knee-deep in this gripping plot of
deception that I cannot even start to fathom where the truth
about Ava’s son disappearance is buried. Duplicity at every turn of the page! You
Don’t Want To Know clever plot is far from predictable. It actually twisted and
turned so many times it blew me away despite all my guessing and theorizing.
The rich cast of characters is complex
and fully nuanced: extravagant, creepy, ambiguous, enigmatic, ghastly,
hypocrite, scheming, are the adjectives
that can better describe the humanity crowding Ava’s estate : ”The whole island
was something out of a Hitchcock novel”, a real nest of vipers.
This heart-stopping mystery is laced with a tenuous
romance, but doesn’t lack the intensity and the heart-warming emotions typical
of a romantic suspense novel. I would highly recommend it to a wide range of
readers, from those who love a good straight psychological thriller to those
who always appreciate a touch of
romance.
You Don’t Want To Know was my
first Lisa Jackson’s novel and certainly not the last. I would like to thank
the publisher for offering a complimentary copy in exchange of a honest review.
