The Visitors - Miranda Rijks

Reading Challenge Category: Free ARC from Booksprout

Official Blurb:

She offered them a place to stay. They wanted so much more.
Hannah’s life is almost perfect. She’s a full-time mother to two young children and married to successful cardiologist Daniel.
The only thing missing is a project of her own. So she has poured heart and soul into converting their stone barn into a beautiful holiday rental.
Things take a dark turn when visitors Mike and Nadia come to stay. They are noisy, dirty and disrespectful. Hannah is incensed by their behaviour, worried they may wreck her lovingly restored barn.
But she gradually realises that property damage is the least of her worries. Nadia and Mike aren’t here just for a holiday - they have a deeper, darker purpose, one that threatens to destroy Hannah’s entire life.
Spiralling into a nightmare that grows worse with each passing day, Hannah has to find the courage to fight back. But Mike and Nadia are clever and ruthless and they know something that Hannah doesn’t - a shocking secret from the past…

My Thoughts:

Miranda Rijks really knows how to write the perfect Psychological Thriller. The tension and suspense are kept at a steady pace throughout the book. It was gripping and riveting from start to finish.
I didn’t have a clue how the book would end or what the twists would be, but when they came they were a little of what I’d suspected, but I hadn’t quite been able to figure it all out. I don’t often remember the prologue to a book until the end and go “oh yeah the author did sort of warn us right back then!” However, in this case, it stuck with me throughout the book, so I was expecting a certain outcome, and at one point I was tempted to go back and read it but decided to carry on reading and see how it played out instead.
I felt such anxiety at Mike and Nadia’s antics; I’m a neat freak so their mess would have driven me up the wall as well and the thought of them trashy that beautiful barn had me very jittery. They were great characters, though, really feisty and well thought out. Hannah, on the other hand, seemed to be a bit of an airhead. She was way too accepting of circumstances and too much of a ‘yes-man’. I know she wanted good reviews, but this behaviour carried on after the ‘event’. She didn’t question enough of her husband’s strange attitudes or the missing 80k. I’d have been hunting that down with all my might!
I loved Rijks’ note at the end, explaining how this book came into fruition and how important it is to her; it made the book feel all that more special.
Overall, a fantastic and brilliantly written book.

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