Everything But The Truth

Goodreads Description

Just how much can you trust the person you love? Everything but the Truth is Gillian McAllister's stunning breakthrough thriller about deceit, betrayal and one woman's compulsive need to uncover the truth It all started with the email. Rachel didn't even mean to look. She loves Jack and she's pregnant with their child. She trusts him. But now she's seen it, she can't undo that moment. Or the chain of events it has set in motion. Why has Jack been lying about his past? Just what exactly is he hiding? And doesn't Rachel have a right to know the truth at any cost?

My Review

I wanted to love this one. I had heard many good things about it and being the fan of psychological thrillers that I am, I really thought I'd fall at its feet. I have good news and bad news. I'll start with the bad. By the time I had reached 50% of my way through this book I liked it, but nothing more. It was heading for a solid 3 star review. Now for the good news. By the time I finished the book, I loved it. Strange how that can happen sometimes, isn't it?

Personally, I found this a tale of two halves. The first half of the book was very slow to build. The tension was there, definitely, but it was a slow burn. Now, many people don't mind that, especially with psychological thrillers, which are generally slower in pace than thrillers or crime procedurals, but for me, I found that not much happened in the first half of the book. Yes, Rachel has met a new man, and yes, he hasn't been telling her the whole truth about who he is, but that's all you really know. But then things start to kick off and I found that I was suddenly racing through the pages, dying to know the big secret. I'm not quite sure what changed between the two halves, but I think it was the slow emergence of the secret. Also, Rachel had managed to get hold of a copy of the court transcript and had started reading it and Rachel's own back story from a year ago was all coming together.

This is a great book. Don't expect many huge twists and turns and "OMG" moments like you find in many psychological thrillers these days, but this is still a good, solid, entertaining read. It's more of a character driven story which focuses on moral issues. I actually thought that the ending was going to go in a different direction, but I was wrong. Had it gone in that direction it might have had more of a twist common of psychological thrillers, but the fact that it didn't really wasn't an issue.

The premise of this book was intriguing and it did raise a number of questions: How well can you ever know anyone after only a few months? How easy is it to hide one's past from a new partner? By the end of the book it was clear that one of the main themes of the book was that none of us are perfect, that we all make mistakes and that often our mistakes cause strife to other people. This wasn't something that I had thought a lot about but this book brought it home. And it's so true. Many of us would have had similar experiences to the main characters in this book - we would have done something so out of character, and someone got hurt as a result of our actions. Does that make us bad people? Probably not. But read this book and it may give you some food for thought in regard to that topic.

Overall, a really good debut. I look forward to reading more by this author, whose next book will be released in early 2018.

Rating: * * * *

Publication Date: April 2017 (South Africa)

Genre: Psychological Thriller / Suspense

Format: Paperback

Source: Review copy received from the publisher. Many thanks to author Gillian McAllister and Penguin SA for my copy. It was my pleasure to read and review this title.