Follow You Home follows (see what I did there?) Daniel and Laura as they are wrapping up what is supposed to be a trip of a lifetime. After this, these thirty somethings are going to settle down, have a baby and live an uneventful but happy life in London. But you know what they say about best laid plans right? Yeah, everything pretty much goes to hell. The happy couple find themselves on a train travelling through Romania. There’s already a little tension because Daniel skimped on the tickets and they don’t have their own private sleeper car. To make matters worse, some creepy guy is eyeing up Laura, a nice couple seems to be taking perhaps a little too much interest in them and they are very tired. So tired that they make the decision to sneak into one of the sleeper cars and take a nap. Unfortunately, the door won’t lock but Daniel offers to stay awake and alert her if the ticket guy comes so that they can sneak back out. Unfortunately yet again, Daniel falls asleep and when they wake, they learn that all of their money, identification and passports have been stolen. They are kicked off the train with Alina (one half of the couple that they met earlier) with the thought that they will walk to the next town following the train tracks in the hopes of getting in contact with their consulate and getting home. Just one problem, Alina goes into the woods and disappears. Daniel and Laura attempt to look for her and come upon a strange, ramshackle home within the woods…and the horrors within follow them home, both physically and mentally.
We catch up with them three months after their return home and without knowing what was in that house we see the damage that has been inflicted upon them. We learn that they agreed that they would never tell anyone what happened in Romania and that they themselves wouldn’t talk about it again. Laura has moved in with friends and is talking with ghosts/slowly separating from reality while Daniel is drinking himself into oblivion. Daniel needs to talk about Romania though and as soon as he starts, bad things begin happening–, robberies, some Molotov Cocktail throwing (now we’ve got a story going!) and deaths. Both Daniel and Laura are in danger but their weakened states leaves them open to attack.
OK, so here’s the deal with this book, it’s suspenseful, it’s captivating and the slow reveal about what was in the house worked really, really well. The problem is all the other stuff. Beware spoiler here: The couple on the train were looking to plant drugs on them and did so…but the passports, getting kicked off the train, and the weird house in the woods was not part of the plan. Sooooooo….here’s my problem with that drug story line, I cannot for the life of me believe that someone in Romania would attempt to track down a couple of people they planted drugs on to get them back. I just looked it up, it’s 1392 miles to get from Romania to London, unless they planted like ten kilos on them, I don’t really see the point (or the monetary reward) of trying to track it down. The other story line though? That was pretty terrifying…but also unrealistic for pretty much the same global reasons. A decent read but deals with some really dark things that could be too much for many readers. I’d skip it and read the new Cormoran Strike book instead (<—-my new tag line, y’all!)
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