Rating: 5 ‘What The Hell Did I Just Read?’ Stars

Publisher: Grim Heart Publishing

Genre: Psychological Thriller

Tags: Contemporary, Kidnapping, Mental Illness, Non-Romance, Thriller

Length: 247 Pages

Reviewer: Cindi

Purchase At: Amazon

TW: Attempted Suicide, Severe Mental Illness, Thoughts of Past Emotional, Physical, and Sexual Abuse

Blurb –

Play along to stay alive.

When tragedy strikes, Erin races to the hospital to be by her brother’s side—but never makes it. A flat tire on a lonely road. A stranger with a kind smile. A car ride straight into a nightmare.

She awakens in a child’s bedroom. Pink walls, glittery drawings, a collection of dolls… and no way out. Erin’s captor offers her a mind-boggling proposition: play the part of his sickly sister, and in return Erin will be freed when all is said and done.

But the truth is far darker than Erin imagines. This house hides many deadly secrets, and she will need to rely on more than basic instincts if she hopes to escape. Because survival isn’t always fight or flight.

Sometimes you must play along to stay alive.

Review –

Just play along…

I’m going to start by saying take note of the above trigger warnings if you plan to read this. It starts out with one of the characters rescuing their sibling after a suicide attempt. There are also psychological disorders that play a huge part in the book. I can’t say exactly what they are without giving everything away, but if you want to know, shoot me a message.

Erin has just woken up to a scary voicemail from her younger brother, Theo. It’s a goodbye message. She rushes out of her place to his and finds him in the bathroom. 911 is called and she’s following the ambulance to the hospital when she has a flat tire in her car. Desperate to get to Theo, she makes a huge mistake when a young man in a truck pulls up beside her. She asks him for a ride to the hospital. He looks like your typical teenage boy – I don’t think his age was ever mentioned, but he’s young – and not the least bit intimidating.

That turns out to be the biggest mistake of Erin’s life.

The boy doesn’t go anywhere near the hospital. Instead, he takes Erin to an old house in the middle of nowhere and forces her to take a sleeping pill. When she wakes up, she’s locked inside what appears to be a little girl’s bedroom. There are pink walls and dolls all over the place.

Kenny has issues. Between his mentally unstable mother, and his always-sick fourteen-year-old sister Melissa, his life is nowhere close to being normal. For reasons I can’t disclose without typing a spoiler, he kidnaps Erin because she has the same build and haircolor as Melissa. Erin is to pretend to be his sister with their mother Meredith. With Meredith’s issues, Erin will easily pass for Melissa. Erin has to just play along. Kenny swears he won’t hurt her, but she knows better. She’s locked inside a teenager’s bedroom, and is forced to pretend for a woman who honestly believes Erin is her daughter.

Standing outside her room, I study the doorknob which locks from the outside. It’s locked now, of course. For her safety.

Erin rightfully panics. One, she’s been kidnapped, and two, she has no idea if her brother is still alive. Over the next few days, a lot of things are happening, with most happening in the background away from Erin. When she gets violently ill, she realizes that Meredith is drugging her food. This causes major problems with both Kenny and his mother, especially the mother. It takes no time at all for Erin to figure out that Meredith has Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and is intentionally making her sick so Meredith can take care of her.

All of that leads to the question… where is the real Melissa? I can’t answer that without pretty much giving everything away.

Then there’s Theo, Erin’s younger brother. Is he still alive? If so, is he wondering where his sister is? Does he think she abandoned him when he needed her the most? He and Erin grew up in foster care. They literally only have each other.

All the questions are answered in a big way.

There’s so much I want to say about this book but I can’t. The whole thing is one huge spoiler. Nobody is as they seem, and some issues are far deeper than the reader realizes until almost the very end. After I finished, I found myself going back to reread certain sections of the book and was thinking, “Now it makes sense…”

The ending was great. I absolutely love how everything played out. And unlike The 11th Hour Motel that needed an epilogue desperately but didn’t have one, Just Play Along does show some of the characters a few months down the road.

This was a really good book. The story moves along quickly, and there are no unnecessary or overly descriptive paragraphs. You get the feel for the book and the characters without a bunch of miscellaneous stuff thrown in. I was very happy with how everything came together.

A very easy 5 stars.