Why can't she get past the murder? What is happening to her that she can't remember anything? Will she wind up alone, unaware of what is going on around her? As Cass is about to leave after her meeting with Rachel, a young girl from another table gives Cass a phone, telling her that it is Rachel’s. This seems unlikely to Cass, so to confirm it, she calls the first number in the called list. She gets Matthew’s answerphone.

Matthew becomes impatient with her memory loss, sleepiness, and possible addiction to sleeping pills, and they begin to fight. After a particularly rough patch, Cass wakes up feeling ill. She calls an ambulance. At the hospital, she is diagnosed as having taken an overdose. She denies it, but testing finds that she has taken a large number of her spare pills, and she wonders if she might have taken an overdose and forgotten about it. Cass is beside herself with guilt, could she have saved this woman? or would she herself have been murdered if she'd stopped to help? This has to be the thriller of the year! There were times when I was holding my breath, gripping the book so intensely I thought I would break my e-reader. It was that crazy. B.A. Paris’ “The Breakdown” is an emotional psychological thriller. It grips you from the first sentence and keeps hold till the last. Cass was an unreliable heroine so I obviously questioned everything she said and everything she did for a good part of the story. I sympathized with her and, even though I found her to be an interesting and well-developed character, she frustrated the hell out of me. God, at times, I wanted to slap the woman senseless.

What to Read Next

The only thing she can't forget is that woman, the woman she might have saved, and the terrible nagging guilt. Finding text messages between Rachel and Matthew, Cass works out that they are responsible for the nuisance calls, and also for manipulating her to make her think she is losing her memory. She realizes that Rachel and Matthew are having an affair. This book did not grab me. Also let's talk about the character development, there was not one character that I liked, they were all dislikeable characters to me.

To sum it all up it was an entertaining, gripping, fast-paced, and an easy read with an unexpected and exciting ending. Highly recommend!!

The Breakdown

She starts struggling to remember things. Knowing her mother had been diagnosed with early onset dementia made all of her forgetfulness convince her that she too had the disease. Mysterious parcels arrive, silent phone calls, she is doubting her own sanity. Thank you so much to NetGalley, B.A. Paris, and St. Martin's Press for the opportunity to read an advance copy of this book for a fair and honest review. Where’s my car? There’s a ridiculous scene in a parking garage, ridiculous because it is a logistical mess. I had to reread the scene many times and in the end it still didn’t make sense. Where oh where did the editor go?

Shaken, Cass decides to retake control of her life. She visits Jane’s husband and admits to him that she saw Jane on the night of her murder. He reassures her that she is not to blame for Jane’s death. He also persuades her that her nuisance caller is probably not the murderer: it’s more likely to be someone she knows. The next time she receives a nuisance call, she tells the caller off. I felt like some of the things in this novel were just NOT believable (like Behind Closed Doors). I feel like the author could have done some AMAZING things with this storyline but it just fell flat for me. I was expecting more and it wasn't there unfortunately. It didn't have the ever dropping mouth twist that it could of had nor the WOW factor in a psychological thriller. I do feel I liked it a little better then Behind Closed Doors but again just kinda meh. I think we have all heard those stories about stopping to help a stranger whose car has broken down. It’s the perfect setup for serial killers looking for their next victim, and has been the opening for countless eerie ghost stories. As badly as you might feel for the person, would you risk your life on a dark, lonely highway in the middle of a storm, with no cell service?Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival. The other major theme is dementia. What a horrible realization it must be to discover you are, for all intents and purposes, losing your mind. If this insidious disease runs in your family, any tiny misplaced item or forgotten appointment could trigger alarm bells.

Okay, while I found this story to be really fun and exciting for the most part I must say that I did find some of it to be a little predictable and tedious in parts but it sure made up for it though with its heavy buildup of anticipation, the thrilling climax, and the unexpected and surprising conclusion to make this an extremely good read. Cass is forgetting quite a lot of things these days. Riddled with guilt, self-doubt, and untold truths, her mind begins to slip. Then the telephone calls begin, with no one speaking but with an air of menace about them. Has someone been in the house? Why can't she remember anything? The paranoia begins to eat her alive, and she fears she is going mad. Her wild ravings and accusations have eroded her credibility with her husband, her friends, and the police. Cass is convinced the killer of the woman in the car is after her now. Ten years later Finn is engaged to Layla’s sister, Ellen. Their shared grief over what happened to Layla drew them close and now they intend to remain together. Still, there’s something about Ellen that Finn has never fully understood. His heart wants to believe that she is the one for him...even though a sixth sense tells him not to trust her. Cass clearly presents with paranoia due to driving home one evening and seeing this woman on the side of the road in a storm and she does not stop to help her and the next morning finds out that she has been murdered. Cass starts receiving random phone calls with no one speaking and feels like she is being watched. Cass starts to forget things and believes she may have onset early dementia (a disease her mother had) and it just continues to tumble down from there..... ehhhFrom beginning to end, this read was addictive. I gobbled it whole, and even though some of the logic in this plot may not hold up under the heavy scrutiny of the savvy thriller-reader—I cannot recommend this one enough to fans of the genre! Anyone who has read the runaway hit ‘Behind Closed Doors’, has probably been looking forward, with great anticipation, to the second novel by this author. Expectations were high, and the excitement about the book was palpable.