Review: Under Your Skin – Rose McClelland

My rating 4.5/5 stars

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

When Kyle’s wife Hannah goes missing the whole town is out in force to try to find her. Her husband, Kyle, launches a campaign, Julia decides to help out as a good deed, and Detective Kerry Lawlor is brought in to investigate the case with no clues and no trace of Hannah. Someone knows what has happened to Hannah; someone is keeping a secret…

My thoughts

I was kindly sent a copy of Under Your Skin by Rose in exchange for an honest review.

Between all the books I have read recently it has been a while since I’ve read a thriller and this was the perfect one to ease me back into them. I honestly sat and read it in one day; I couldn’t put it down. The book is 219 pages so was such a perfect size for reading in one sitting.

The characters in the novel are what really sold this book for me. Every single character was flawed and was hiding something which I think made some of the lesser characters more relatable and brought out their significance. The fact that they all also had something to hide really added to the mystery of what had happened to Hannah.

This novel is told from five points of view. It is one of the only novels that I have read that is told from so many first person perspectives but in this storyline it really worked. It allowed for all perspectives of the mystery to unravel naturally but still left room for questions. At points I was getting confused between the characters Kate and Kelly but that was purely because both names started with a K, once I had my brain in gear there was no confusion. The fact that Hannah, as a victim, had a voice was particularly well done and added an edge to the novel.

Rose does an excellent job of portraying the disturbing and damaging effects of domestic violence on a victim. I was so happy that there was no victim blaming and that the victims of the abuse were well supported by the other characters and supported by the way that they were written. The topic was written in the novel with respect to domestic violence victims which I can only applaud Rose for.

This book has an air of realism to it. Not all of the events were wacky and wild. This had more of an authentic story and there are many people who end up in situation’s like Hannah’s all over the world and it is important to recognise this. This was another merit to the novel and although not everything was 100% realistic (come on it’s fiction its not always going to be), there was still a hint of truth to Hannah’s story that continued to make me think once I had finished the novel.

Overall I would recommend that novel to those that love a hard-hitting mystery/thriller. There were twists and turns in the plot yet all the lose ends were tied up at the end which I loved. For those that mystery/thrillers are not your genre of choice, I would still recommend this book to you as a way of breaking in to the genre as this is focuses on real-life themes compared to other, more far-fetched, thrillers.