Wednesday, 25 May 2022

Fragile by Sarah Hilary














From Goodreads

Everything she touches breaks . . .

Nell Ballard is a runaway. A former foster child with a dark secret she is desperate to keep, all Nell wants is to find a place she can belong.

So when a job comes up at Starling Villas, home to the enigmatic Robin Wilder, she seizes the opportunity with both hands.

Only her new lodgings may not be the safe haven that she was hoping for. Her employer lives by a set of rigid rules and she soon sees that he is hiding secrets of his own.

But is Nell’s arrival at the Villas really the coincidence it seems? After all, she knows more than most how fragile people can be – and how easy they can be to break . . .

A dark contemporary psychological thriller with a modern Gothic twist from an award winning and critically acclaimed writer who has been compared to Ruth Rendell, PD James and Val McDermid. Rebecca meets The Handmaid’s Tale in Sarah Hilary’s standalone breakout novel, Fragile.


My thoughts

I grabbed a copy of this from my local Library.  I am not sure how I came across it really, whether it's a book that I spotted someone reading and I thought it looked good or it just took my fancy.

This is a book that I kept reading as I was keen to find out what had happened.  Nell takes a job working for Robin Wilder in his house, she is a housekeeper, cleaner, companion and apparent mistress in some ways of Sparling Villas.  Robin was a very controlling employee and was so set in his ways, I worried about Nell's safety at times.  It soon becomes apparent that things aren't as they seem and the reader is taken on a journey of discovery as they uncover secrets along the way.  Can the coincidence of Nell arriving at Sparling Villas be as innocent as it at first appears or are there ulterior motives behind her going for this job?

I did enjoy the story on the whole, but I felt it was lacking at times and this has made me drop my rating.  It started off with great promise, but floundered around the middle and maybe it would have made for a better read if it had been read in greater chunks than I did.  Sometimes though when we lose interest in books, we find that we don't always read it in large chunks.  

This is the first book that I have read by this Author and it is a standalone read of hers, I will read more books by her to see how they compare with this one.

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