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Are You Awake?

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Her two young children never let her rest, so one exhausting night, in the middle of a London heatwave, she escapes to a nearby park for some air. There's maybe a bit of slow start as the author gets all the players in place, but even wondering how they'd all connect kept me turning the pages and before long I couldn't stop turning the pages. Are You Awake by Claire McGowan takes the reader on a mystery that is both surreal and recognizable at the same time. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. They both believe they are seeing an attack or some form of violence taking place in an abandoned building.

Without thinking, she deposits the children back to bed and barely stopping to grab a robe, Mary marches out the door and across the street to where the stranger is snooping. Coincidentally, there is a missing 19-year old woman from their town, and they can’t help but wonder if that’s who they saw in the window of the house. There, the two strangers witness what looks like a violent attack in the window of a neighbouring house. Although I liked Tim, and felt compassion for all he has endured-I struggled whenever the narrative switched to Mary! As I mentioned above, there are some very amusing scenes in this book, and I think it would have benefited if it just embraced the humorous aspects of what silly things the characters were doing here and there.Unable to sleep at night, Tim, wonders from room to room of his apartment wondering if he will ever be able to live again. However, she makes terrible decision after terrible decision that someone that smart would unlikely make. The police don’t believe them, but when they hear of a potential link to an old murder and a string of disappearances from the area, pressure mounts to find her before it’s too late. The final resolution to Sam’s disappearance and several other unsolved crimes is almost like pulling a rabbit out of a hat – fine for a magic show but not a very satisfactory ending for a mystery novel. Although I have always found the author's previous works enjoyable, I cannot include this one in my list of recommendations.

It is possible that my perspective may be unpopular, but I am convinced that honesty should always be the guiding principle. Meanwhile hubby Jack snores his way through slumber and oblivion as his exhausted wife sees to the children without an ounce of sleep. Mind you, don't even get me started on husband, Jack (as in Hit the Road if Mary's got any sense - she hasn't). But with her marriage under strain and the police on their tail, Mary begins to doubt her own mind…and Tim’s. Despite their unending tiredness, these neighbors both end up in a park near their homes at 4 AM peering up at a lit window of a home where they both believe they’ve seen a young woman, Samantha Ellis, recently reported missing in the news.Mary and Tim happen to meet in the park the next night, and confirm they both saw, or thought they saw, the same thing. Tim, a neighbour, was a war journalist but is suffering from PSTD and insomnia and has also escaped to the park. She has had four radio plays broadcast on the BBC, and her thrillers What You Did and The Other Wife were both number-one bestsellers. And when they see news reports of a missing woman who was last seen walking alone not far from them, the pair are convinced it’s her they saw being attacked—no matter what the police say. As the pair are drawn into a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse, the culprit appears to be even closer to home than they thought.

For Mary it's a chance to have something for herself outside of motherhood, whilst for Tim, it's the first time he's been interesting in anything (apart from stalking his ex-wife) for a long time.Ultimately I found the ending unsatisfying and I don’t think it made much sense in terms of the story up to that point. Unfolding through the alternating narratives of Mary and Tim, there is also the odd narrative from the missing Samantha, leaving you wondering what exactly has happened to her. The children unfortunately share a room in their pokey little two bed flat on the outskirts of London, meaning when one wakes then the other does also.

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