Book Review ~ The Stranger Inside by Laura Benedict

Book: The Stranger Inside

Author: Laura Benedict

Genre: Mystery Thriller

Release: Mulholland Books | February 5, 2019

YOU PUT YOUR KEY IN THE LOCK. The door won’t open.

THE HOUSE SHOULD BE EMPTY. But someone else is here.

There’s a stranger living in Kimber Hannon’s house. He tells the police that he has every right to be there, and he has the paperwork to prove it.Kimber definitely didn’t invite this man to move in. He tells her that he knows something about her, and he wants everyone else to know it too.

“I was there. I saw what you did.”

These words reveal a connection to Kimber’s distant past, and dark secrets she’d long ago left buried. This trespasser isn’t after anything as simple as her money or her charming Craftsman bungalow. He wants to move into her carefully orchestrated life—and destroy it.

This book, I’m sorry to say, was a disappointment for me. There were a lot of stuff that interested me. Finding a stranger living in your house and claiming that you rented the house to them yourself is not something that happens everyday after all. This alone was enough to grab my attention but the tension that the author built at the very beginning bore no fruit in the end.

I don’t want to go into details for fear of spoiling but generally speaking, this book started out engaging but with every chapter into the life of the main character, Kimber, and this man who occupied her house, it lost a bit of its climax until finally I was left with disappointment. One of the things that I loved was the storyline of the past, we had flashbacks to let us see something that happened in Kimber’s life, but that led to nowhere. At least nowhere I had hopes for. The characters all seemed very immature to me too which in turn made me feel completely disconnected from them. I know in thrillers you’re not required to like the main characters but I couldn’t find anything that interested me about Kimber and her life. And that, I believe, was the reason why it took me so long to finish this story.

I can say that the first half of this book was intriguing but the second half failed to live up to the expectations created from that.

I’m adding two spoonfuls of this story into my hodgepodge.