Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough

You guys... I fell into a trap!  A "you HAVE to read this book" trap and it was horrible!!  I know that this is a bad place to end up... I've been here before and I don't like it at all so why am I here, yet again?!

The book that I got hooked into reading is Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough which has a 3.75 rating on Goodreads, which is generally a decent rating for a thriller - as thriller's tend to be very subjective.  However, I had heard such amazing things about the ending and how it seemed to throw everyone for a loop that I couldn't resist the urge to pick it up from the library.

My first clue that I wouldn't love the book, as promised, was that it was slow.  There wasn't a single moment in the book that I thought, "oh, here we go... shit's about to go down".  Nope, never!  In fact, I kept waiting and waiting and waiting for that moment to happen.  As I reached the halfway point in the book, I only kept reading for the ending - which was a mistake because now ALL my hopes and prayers are on it and there couldn't have been less pressure on this poor story and it's ending if I'd tried.  It had to be OVER-THE-TOP amazing and as a devout thriller reader, that is really hard to come by.  Even my 5-star reads aren't the best endings because I've read so many of these books over the years that you start to learn the endings, plot twists.

As for the ending - this "you won't see it coming" twist??  Totally called it before it actually happened.  It didn't even shock me when I finally read it in the pages.  Now, I will give Sarah Pinborough some credit because it was a genius idea and one that I most definitely hadn't read before, so in that respect, I totally get the awe that this book gets.  However, when the balance of the book is as boring and lackluster as this one was, even a never-before seen ending can't make up the difference.

The characters, mainly three, were all okay - nothing special about them.  The atmosphere was blank and by blank I mean that I couldn't really feel the 'thrill'.  I love when I book sets a spooky or spine-chilling atmosphere - dreary weather, creepy people - but Behind Her Eyes wasn't really set anywhere.  I couldn't get a feel for the locale or the feeling of the surroundings. 

Overall, I am giving this book a 2-star rating but only because I haven't read an ending like this before because without the new ending, it would have likely been a DNF!

Guess I re-learned my lesson - LISTEN to your own brain and not that of others.  Ugh!