The Prisoner by B.A. Paris (2022)
Well, honestly, as much as I've enjoyed staying up late with previous B.A. Paris thrillers, this one ended up as a disappointment.
I was completely on board and riveted with the book's first half, with alternating before/during/after chapters detailing a young woman's rocky backstory and her ordeal as a kidnap victim.
Amelie, a suddenly orphaned French teenager, bravely decides to hit the road on her own, managing to make her way to London. In a fortunate turn of events, she finds a group of women who offer her employment, friendship and even mentoring..
But then in an unfortunate turn of events, she unwisely enters a devil's marriage bargain to secure money for a law school education. Her husband of convenience is the odious Ned Hawthorne, a wealthy, spoiled rotten heir to his philanthropist father's fortune.......and a toxic, sociopathic abuser and rapist of women.
Amelie and Ned find themselves abducted for ransom and held separately.....but by whom? And what if Ned's imperious billionaire dad doesn't feel like coughing up a ransom for both of them?
For non-spoiler purposes I can only speak vaguely about the slow, far-fetched and downright tedious second half of the book, which deals with the aftermath of the first half.
Some twists and turns appear along this slow road to the story's wrap-up, finally finishing in a long, long laborious account of the confounding motives and behaviors of all the major participants. This sort of resembles one of those Hercule Poirot accounts of the who, what and why of everything, but nothing of the revelations come across as particularly clever or believable.
A page-turning, gangbusters first half for sure, but for me, the rest of "The Prisoner" devolved into at best, a 2 star read. (**)
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