Sophie Hannah can always be counted on for a solid 3 stars

I have read so many Sophie Hannah books, and outside the Spilling CID novels (which tend to be pretty good), not one of her one-off novels has been great. But — they don’t quite suck either. And they’re usually an easy, one evening read.

Cara Burrows has “fled” her perfectly nice husband and their two children in England to spend two weeks at a resort in Arizona. She has her reasons, but really, they’re pretty shitty. While at the resort, she wanders into the wrong room on her first night and runs into a man and a teenage girl — who disappear the next day. But Cara thinks she recognizes the girl — who should have died 7 years ago.

For a Sophie Hannah book, I found this one shockingly easy to “solve”. That’s not really a negative, though, since some of her more mysterious books tend to have batshit crazy resolutions. I know it sounds like I didn’t like this book but really, it wasn’t so bad. And the sidekick character — Tarin — seriously cracked me up. Hannah’s opinions on Americans don’t seem very flattering.