Wow! This was an excellent read! I have read most of her books but I think this one is my new favorite. It's creepy, chilling and completely unpredictable. Well done!

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A pair of newlyweds, Tricia and Ethan, get stuck in a house that they were possibly interested in buying when a blizzard hits and strands them there overnight. The house, a huge five-bedroom mansion located way off the beaten path, was formerly owned by a well-to-do psychiatrist, Dr. Adrienne Hale, who also saw her patients there and recorded her sessions with them. Dr. Hale has been missing for four years and is thought by the police to have been murdered by her boyfriend, Luke. But is that what really happened? The narrative of the novel is told by switching between Tricia in the present day and Adrienne before she went missing. Tricia is not too thrilled with buying this remote house and gets bad vibes by what might have happened there. But Ethan is set to make the purchase and likes its location and its beautiful layout. During the night, Tricia looks for a book to read and discovers a hidden room containing the tapes of Dr. Hales sessions with her patients. She can't resist listening and discovers a possible motive for murder.

This was a real page-turner and of course I was totally wrong about what really happened here. There are some twists at the end that I didn't see coming at all. The author was great at leading the reader down a false path and then completely changing what she had planted in the reader's mind. I enjoyed this one a lot and I'll probably be looking for more by McFadden.

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Newlyweds Tricia and Ethan have been house hunting. They've set up an appointment with a realtor to look at a huge house outside of the city. When they arrive, the snow is coming down and the realtor is a no-show. Lucky for them, the house is open. When they start looking around, they discover that this house was owned by Dr. Adrienne Hale, a well-known psychiatrist who disappeared without a trace nearly four years ago. Her house hasn't been touched since that time.

As soon as they arrive, Tricia gets a creepy feeling that there is someone else in the house. As the snowstorm continues, they are snowed in until the driveway can be cleared. Tricia looks for a book to pass the time and runs across a secret room containing hundreds of cassette tapes of Dr. Hale's sessions with her patients. As Tricia listens to the tapes, she learns about Dr. Hale and the truth of what led up to her disappearance.

I'm going to have to start avoiding any books known as psychological thrillers. I find that I typically don't like the characters and the narrator is usually unreliable. (There are a few exceptions.) In this story we get Tricia's first-person point-of-view, along with flashbacks to Adrienne and her psychiatry practice, and we get to listen to some of her session tapes. It sounds confusing, but it was easy to follow. There was a lot of inner dialogue in this book. Tricia's thoughts seemed very repetitive at times. We went over a few things many, many times.

I had theories as to what was happening, but I ended up being way off base. There were some huge twists in this story. But when it came to the end of the story, I realized that there were some things we were told in the first half of the book, that didn't make any sense by the end of the book. Sigh...I just shouldn't read psychological thrillers. My rating: 2.5 Stars.

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