Cassandra has a great life. She is a school teacher, a job
she loves, is in a happy marriage to a man who is not only
gorgeous but also very devoted to her. It is the end of the
school year and she is looking forward to the weeks off that
she will have before school starts again. At a dinner with
her colleagues to celebrate their coming break, she receives
a phone call from her husband, Mark. He tells her that he
has a migraine and will be sleeping in the spare room that
night to try to get rid of it, so that he will not be able
to stay awake to see her when she gets home. Of course,
Cassandra understands as these migraines are a part of
Mark's life. He makes her promise not to drive on the
deserted shortcut road to their home since there is a severe
thunderstorm going on. After assuring him that she will not
go down that road, they hang up and she rejoins her co-workers.
Cassandra does not keep her promise, though, and, in spite
of the rain, she takes the shortcut. As she drives through
the blinding storm, she spots a car on the side of the road.
That is when she sees something that she is never meant to
see. Actually, she is not totally sure what it was she
witnessed.
Choosing not to say anything, Cassandra tries to settle back
into her life. Things begin to happen to her, though, that
defy logic. She is forgetting the smallest of things that
gradually become more serious. Fearing for her sanity, she
keeps these things to herself.
The problem is that she seems to have someone stalking her
and she has no idea who or why. After all, murderers usually
do not stalk witnesses to their crimes. They just kill them.
B.A. Paris has crafted an ingenious plot with THE BREAKDOWN
and makes me wonder where she has been hiding all this time.
She takes you on a ride that is wilder than anything at an
amusement park you will ever experience. The characters are
written in such a way as to draw you in and make you immerse
yourself into their world. THE BREAKDOWN leads you on a
merry chase as you try to discover what is going on with
them and where they might fit into all of the things that
are happening to Cass.
Her best friend, Rachel, has been a rock for Cass in the
middle of all this and is the one person that she feels that
she can confide in. Rachel has a way of coming up with
rational reasons for everything that is going on, which
soothes Cass quite a bit. Then, there is John, another
co-worker who seems to have more than a passing interest in
Cass. The interaction between the characters might be
infuriating at times, but it is always captivating. The only
criticism that I have regarding THE BREAKDOWN is that I
really wanted to reach into the pages of the book and shake
the characters because I could not understand the stupidity,
arrogance, and insensitivity that fairly jumped out at me.
In a way, it almost seemed as if B.A. Paris was not sure if
she liked her characters or not. They had quite a few flaws,
but as you will discover, there is a method to her madness.
One other thing, there were a couple of loose ends
that I would have liked to see more tied up, but these were
certainly not serious enough to detract from the plot.
I really loved this book! It kept me up reading until the
early morning hours because I simply had to see what was
going to happen next. THE BREAKDOWN is the perfect storm of
mystery, madness, and mayhem, which does not come along as
often as I would like. Do not miss this one if you enjoy an
excellent page turner that will ensnare you to the point of
needing to see how it all turns out. Just when you think you
have it figured out, you don't.
The next chilling, propulsive novel from the NYT and
USA Today bestselling author of Behind Closed
Doors.
If you can\'t trust yourself, who can
you trust?
Cass is having a hard time since the
night she saw the car in the woods, on the winding rural
road, in the middle of a downpour, with the woman sitting
inside—the woman who was killed. She\'s been trying to put
the crime out of her mind; what could she have done, really?
It\'s a dangerous road to be on in the middle of a storm.
Her husband would be furious if he knew she\'d broken her
promise not to take that shortcut home. And she probably
would only have been hurt herself if she\'d
stopped.
But since then, she\'s been forgetting every
little thing: where she left the car, if she took her pills,
the alarm code, why she ordered a pram when she doesn\'t
have a baby.
The only thing she can\'t forget is that
woman, the woman she might have saved, and the terrible
nagging guilt.
Or the silent calls she\'s receiving,
or the feeling that someone\'s watching her….
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