One For Sorrow - Sarah A. Denzil

Reading Challenge Category: Just wanted to read

Official Blurb:

Who really killed Maisie Earnshaw?
Within the walls of the high-security psychiatric facility, Crowmont Hospital, reside many violent offenders. To nurse Leah Smith, no matter what, all offenders are patients first and foremost. When Leah is appointed as nurse to Isabel Fielding, she is determined to remain professional despite the shocking crime Isabel allegedly committed in her past.
Years ago, six-year-old Maisie Earnshaw was found face down in a duck pond, her body mutilated. Isabel--at age fourteen, found covered in Maisie's blood--was convicted of murder.
As Leah spends time with Isabel, she comes to know her as a young woman with a sweet, gentle nature, someone she could never see as a murderer. Leah begins to suspect members of the Fielding family of framing Isabel as a young girl, and she's not the only one. True crime blogger James Gorden thinks Isabel is innocent too.
Is Leah allowing her own dark past to taint her judgement as she grows closer to her patient? Or has a young woman been unjustly robbed of her childhood?

My Thoughts:

It’s taken me a while to get around to reading this series, but oh wow, I wish I’d started sooner. I’m completely blown away by the genre of the book. For some reason, with it being a series dubbed the ‘Isabel Fielding series’, I had it in my head that she was a detective and they would be crime books. I couldn’t have been more wrong. She is the ‘baddie’, and this is a Psychological Thriller. This wasn’t a problem as I love both genres; it just took me by surprise.
The book is enchanting right from the beginning when Isabel walks out of the woods covered in blood. What happened? We don’t get to find out for a very long time!
Isabel does not narrate the book; however, it is mainly from the perspective of Leah, a psychiatric nurse tasked with looking after Isabel in Crowmont hospital. There are also intermittent chapters from a blogger, James Garden, who is trying to get to the truth of what happened in the woods that day and who killed Maisie Earnshaw. As the book progresses, it becomes apparent why the author didn’t want you to be privy to Isabel’s thoughts. At the time of reading, though, I wondered why this was, and I wished we could get things from her point of view.
The book is quite slow in part one, but it somehow still kept me captivated. The characters are interesting, all the tiny little oddities are intriguing, and I just couldn’t put it down. It was very well written, with simply the character development and the building of the storyline to keep you gripped. Part one ends, though on somewhat of a cliffhanger, and you eagerly turn the page to find part two, and so much has changed.
I felt a little whiplashed; I kept going back and forward over the two pages in case I’d missed something. From this point on, the book just doesn’t let you go.
There are so many shocks and twists that I was almost tempted to go back to the beginning to see if there’d been any clues. It was all very cleverly done, and I hadn’t guessed anything at all. The book becomes very gruesome and sinister towards the end; it was fantastic.
I literally couldn’t put this book down and can’t believe how quickly I devoured it. In fact, at the time of writing this review, I have already finished book two and started three. There just wasn’t time in between to write the review!
A well deserved five star read!

Buy Now on Amazon