To be honest, I don’t even know where to start with this book. The writing was subpar, the plot iffy, yet engaging enough that I read most of the book between my trip from Chicago O’Hare to Dublin, Ireland. Which isn’t saying much. I feel like now days, books are turning into soft-core screenplays, writing just enough text to get the plot by.
Long gone are the days of The Great Expectations or SlaughterHouse-Five's. Sure there great books out there. But 9 times out of ten, they won’t get the recognition they deserve. So we end up with books like the "Good Girl" sitting all nice and shiny in front of the Hudson News.
But I knew better, recognizing it’s cover as attempt to steal some of “Gone Girls” thunder. Yet, I bought it anyways, because I was desperate, having forgotten my own personal book “The Poe Shadow” by Matthew Pearl at home. So I needed a book for my trip. So I shoved out that twenty dollars, which is now appalling, after reading this book. But moving on.
The books starts out with a disappearance of a girl (sound familiar), a Mia Dennett, who is the daughter of a powerful judge, and for the first 150 pages, it’s actually kind of interesting. Jumping between multiple POV’s, we unravel the story from the perspective of the detective Gabe, her mother Eve, and the mysterious Colin Thatcher, but never Mia until the very ending.
We learn that Mia is the black sheep of her family. A school teacher working in a poor underprivileged neighborhood against her father wishes. Which is how she ended up shunned for not following in her father’s more lucrative footsteps. But the story really doesn’t begin until Mia ends up in a bar waiting for her boyfriend who doesn’t show up.
Usher forth the mysterious Colin Thatcher who is awkward and charming at first, but ends up kidnapping her. Then the rest of the book is pretty much their story together and the detective trying to find them.
So Stockholm syndrome seems to play a key role in the decisions made throughout this book, but it’s only mentioned once. And of course the fated predictable twist at the end, which I saw coming, and continue to read to make sure I was right, and of course I was.
Overall, The Good Girl is advertised as an easy read and a thriller. Easy yes… thriller not so much. At first I was indifferent, but as days past and I reflected upon The Good Girl, the more annoyed I got. Two stars is what this book deserves, and that’s only because of the epilogue.
