Her Last Hope by Louise GuyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Three and a half stars.
Two women starting over become friends.
Abi's comfortable life in a wealthy suburb of Melbourne comes to an abrupt end when her husband commits suicide. He has been investing client money without consent and lost it all in a property scam. Ostracised by her former friends, made redundant from her job, and estranged from her teenage son, she gets a job as apartment manager for a run down block of apartments in Elsternwick with an apartment on site.
Lucinda is married to a drug dealer and all-round gangster, when Ryan is jailed for two years for assault she takes her opportunity to vanish without a trace and make a new life in Melbourne with her son Max with a false identity. A chance meeting with a kind, elderly couple at breakfast in the hotel on her first night in Melbourne persuades Lucinda to move to the Elsternwick area of Melbourne. Abi's first job is to get a tenant for an empty apartment and Lucinda seems like the perfect tenant, clean, respectable and able to pay two months rent in advance.
Faced at every turn by fresh evidence of Eric's perfidy (sorry, never used that word before but it just popped into my head) Abi sinks deeper into depression, not helped by her son's cutting remarks. Meanwhile Lucinda and Max are enjoying making a new life away from Ryan's violence, making friends and creating a home. But are all their new friends exactly what they seem?
The trouble with this kind of suspense is that the writer needs to drop enough hints for the reader to realise (as they said on Through The Keyhole) that 'the clues were there' and not so few that the reader is blindsided but not so many that the reader can see things coming a mile off. Unfortunately for me, this fell into the the latter category, I thought the clue dropping was so heavy that Lucinda was a fool to stay in Melbourne and I doubt that anyone on the run from a violent criminal would continue to interact with anyone who gave off an odd vibe.
As always this was a well-written novel with engaging characters, just a little obvious for my tastes.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.
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