After a short prologue that finds Nathan Liddle helpless \u201cas a bug on its back\u201d and expecting to be killed at any moment by his beautiful wife, Eve Thayer, a psychiatrist, the story flashes back three weeks to the couple\u2019s strained marriage. While their new baby, Rosewyn, is the proverbial bundle of joy, her needs and bouts of ill health add strain to their relationship. So does Nathan\u2019s careless extramarital affair with a free-spirited woman named Nicole. A parallel plot thread follows Det. Rita Myers and her handling of multiple local crimes. The two threads converge when Rosewyn is kidnapped from the home of babysitter Barbara Singleton. For a while, suspicion falls on Donald Barry\u2014a disgruntled patient of Eve\u2019s\u2014and his wife, Gail, but some strange additional twists widen the circle of suspects. The surprise return of the baby doesn\u2019t solve the original crime; it just deepens the mystery. Parlato\u2019s thriller is breezy but a bit muddled, full of feints, shadowy suspicion, and an 11th-hour murder. Short chapters ricochet among the first-person perspectives of Eve, Nathan, and Rita, making for a quick read and giving the illusion of pace. Both Eve and Rita commiserate about their jobs and their struggles to achieve the elusive work-life balance, Eve with her old friend Rachel and Rita with her brother Danny. The overall effect resembles a Lifetime thriller: half skillfully executed soap opera, half diffuse whodunit.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After a short prologue that finds Nathan Liddle helpless \u201cas a bug on its back\u201d and expecting to be killed at any moment by his beautiful wife, Eve Thayer, a psychiatrist, the story flashes back three weeks to the couple\u2019s strained marriage. While their new baby, Rosewyn, is the proverbial bundle of joy, her needs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1445,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1444"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1444\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}