Hunting Annabelle
by Wendy Heard
“Her scream echoes in my memory. I know what happened. Whether anyone believes me or not, I know.”
Sean Suh is done with killing. After serving three years in a psychiatric prison, he’s determined to stay away from temptation. But he can’t resist Annabelle—beautiful, confident, incandescent Annabelle—who alone can see past the monster to the man inside. The man he’s desperately trying to be.
Then Annabelle disappears.
Sean is sure she’s been kidnapped—he witnessed her being taken firsthand—but the police are convinced that Sean himself is at the center of this crime. And he must admit, his illness has caused him to “lose time” before. What if there’s more to what happened than he’s able to remember?
Though haunted by the fear that it might be better for Annabelle if he never finds her, Sean can’t bring himself to let go of her without a fight. To save her, he’ll have to do more than confront his own demons… He’ll have to let them loose.
A chilling, deeply suspenseful page-turner set in the 1980s, Hunting Annabelle is a stunning debut that will leave you breathless to the very end.
Sean Suh is done with killing. After serving three years in a psychiatric prison, he’s determined to stay away from temptation. But he can’t resist Annabelle—beautiful, confident, incandescent Annabelle—who alone can see past the monster to the man inside. The man he’s desperately trying to be.
Then Annabelle disappears.
Sean is sure she’s been kidnapped—he witnessed her being taken firsthand—but the police are convinced that Sean himself is at the center of this crime. And he must admit, his illness has caused him to “lose time” before. What if there’s more to what happened than he’s able to remember?
Though haunted by the fear that it might be better for Annabelle if he never finds her, Sean can’t bring himself to let go of her without a fight. To save her, he’ll have to do more than confront his own demons… He’ll have to let them loose.
A chilling, deeply suspenseful page-turner set in the 1980s, Hunting Annabelle is a stunning debut that will leave you breathless to the very end.
Momma Says: 3 stars⭐⭐⭐
This psychological thriller starts off strong and quickly establishes the unreliability of our main character, Sean. The use of the unreliable narrator is well-done, the story is dark and often creepy, and a number of red herrings are introduced to pose the whodunit question. However, red herrings aside, this one was a little too easy to figure out the who, and even with Sean's mental state, my thoughts on that didn't waver. The middle of the story lags and is sometimes repetitive as Sean goes about his amateur investigation. There are parts during his search that add to the tension, but they don't really make up for the lag time. Things do pick up, which brings us to the big reveal and where this one lost me. I can get behind a big twist, especially when I've figured out the who, but the why of it all and how it all goes down is ridiculously over the top and just left me shaking my head in exasperation. The ending, while not what I suspect most readers would hope for, could've been the biggest twist of all had it not been for everything that led to that point. It felt like the author was trying a little too hard for that big twist and Stephen King-ish surprise ending, and it all just fell flat for me. In the end, Sean was the saving grace of this story for me. I really like the way his character is done, but the story had so much more potential than was realized.
❃❃ARC provided by NetGalley and HARLEQUIN - MIRA
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