I came across this book by total accident: it was left on the community bookshelf in the office building where I work, so the typical case of book cover attraction worked on me this time. 

It took just a few seconds on my way home to google Lisa Unger, American novelist, specializing in psychological thrillers, with 23 novels published – although Hungarian translation is only available for two of them: Ink and Bone published in 2018 and The Red Hunter in 2019.

The story has two main lines, starting parallelly and slowly running towards each other to finally cross paths. 

Claudia Bishop’s almost perfect married life is messed up when a robber beats and rapes her in her own home one night, after which she remains pregnant. Since she and her husband had been actively working on making a baby, it is not sure who the father is. Claudia, traumatized and desperate, still decides to keep the baby, but her marriage is ruined during recovery from the trauma, and the couple never makes a paternity test to find out who the biological father is. 

Zoe Drake has a wonderful childhood, living with her family in an old farm house with a police officer for a father and a stay-at-home mom, until one night her life is ruined by a group of invaders, who break into their home, kill her parents and try to kill her as well, while determined to find a pile of cash hidden somewhere on the estate. The 12-year-old girl survives the attack and her uncle takes her in and helps her process the tragedy, grieve and grow up. 

Obviously, the two lines meet, when Claudia gets a visit in the same old farm house by the previous attackers, while Zoe, now a grown-up woman, is ready for the revenge that she feels she deserves. 

The story telling is tense, and although there are some twists in the plot, it is quite predictable – but the real gem lies beneath the suspenseful events: how do different people deal with the trauma they suffered? Are they able to forgive and move on, or are they stuck in helplessness and lost self-determination or are driven by revenge and live to see their wrong-doers suffer? 

It was a nice read, it was often that I could almost see many of the scenes running in a movie – I sometimes even had the feeling that it was written with that in mind.