Wednesday 26 August 2015

Book Review - The Mistake I Made by Paula Daly

Amazon UK
Title: The Mistake I Made
Author: Paula Daly
Format reviewed: Ebook
Source: Netgalley
Publisher: Random House Transworld
Publication Date: 27th August 2015
Rating: 4 Stars


We all think we know who we are.

What we’re capable of.

Roz is a single mother, a physiotherapist, a sister, a friend. She’s also desperate.

Her business has gone under, she’s crippled by debt and she’s just had to explain to her son why someone’s taken all their furniture away.

But now a stranger has made her an offer. For one night with her, he’ll pay enough to bring her back from the edge.

Roz has a choice to make.

The Mistake I Made shows how every little decision you make, even if you think its for the best at the time, is potentially the biggest mistake you will ever make. Especially when you are at the end of your tether and have very little hope left in the world, can you make the right decisions, or will you end up in the same situation as Roz?

Roz is a single mother, her ex husband left her with a large joint debt, her old private physio practice went under, and then she faces an eviction notice. She has no money, the baliffs come and empty the apartment, and obviously has no credit rating left at all. 

Financially she is in a huge hole, and then a relative stranger, a client, offers her a proposition that is too good to refuse. But what will that cost her in the long run?

Although I found the book interesting, it took until the last quarter for it to really get me to completely gripped, and "I'm not putting this down until I'm done" territory. The whole of the first three quarters of the book, alludes to mistakes, but continually feels like it is building to something, I wasn't sure what exactly as I was reading, but it was definitely building. 

And then as the story progresses you understand Roz's decisions a bit more, you can she is really trying to do the best in a bad situation, but just gets her thought process slightly muddled. 

The pacing the book was relatively sedate until the last bit, and I found the story very easy to read, even when it wasn't unputdownable, I still wanted to continually know what was going to happen next, and just what was being built up. 

The Mistake I Made has a different feel to it, to Paula Daly's previous book, in that this is not what I would call a pyschological thriller, or a thriller at all (body count is too low for that!), but a very impressive piece of fiction, that does draw you in and keeps you in suspense. 

I loved The Mistake I Made, and learning Roz's story. I am not sure that I, would have necessarily made the same decisions as Roz, but yet unless you find yourself in that situation, you never really know. 

Thanks to Netgalley and Bantam Press for this review copy. This was my honest review. 

The Mistake I Made is out tomorrow in ebook and hardcover. 

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