We all think we know who we are. What we’re capable of.

Roz is a single mother, a physiotherapist, a sister, a friend. She’s also desperate.

Her business has gone under, she’s crippled by debt and she’s just had to explain to her son why someone’s taken all their furniture away.

But now a stranger has made her an offer. For one night with her, he’ll pay enough to bring her back from the edge.

Roz has a choice to make.

I think this books should have been called the mistakes I made because, seriously, Roz makes a lot. Even for this genre, the domestic thriller, her bad choices and wrong decisions are off the charts. The woman seems to have no sense. When one of those decisions is to sleep with a man she barely knows for money, you know things can’t go well. And they don’t. Instead of making her life better, Roz’s life begins to spiral even further out of control. If I hadn’t of been reading and needed my hands to hold the book I’d have been hiding behind them, not wanting to watch.

That said, I still kind of liked Roz and wanted everything to work out for her in the end. Thats’s because nothing came from a bad place and all her decisions were to help her and her son survive. Paula Daly does a good job of drawing her sympathetically and letting you see inside her head, her thought processes. As a character, I found Roz well written and really detailed. The same wasn’t always true of the other characters and some were a little flat or two dimensional, especially the man offering the money.

For me, though, that was o.k. because it was only a little and the story still moved at quite a pace and there was plenty to distract me. There were lots of twists and turns in the books and moments of tension. What I really liked though was that the book didn’t go down the route of a big climax where people are trapped or chased or put in mortal danger. The ending was more subtle and layered, more morally vague, and I thought more real as a result. I think, reading goodreads, this has disappointed some people but I didn’t feel that way. I thought it was a nice change.

It’s why the book has stayed in my head since I finished it last week and why I would read more Paula Daly. I liked this one and would recommend it.

Enjoy!

Emma