Love You Gone book review

Love You Gone by Rona Halsall
Pages: 306
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‘Hello? Police? My husband and our children… they’re gone.’
When Mel arrives at the holiday cottage in the Lake District, she expects to find the heating on and her husband Luke and the two children waiting for her. Maybe a bottle of wine open…
Instead, there is just a note on the side, saying they’ve gone out for a walk.
But they aren’t back several hours later, and Mel knows something is wrong. Really wrong. When a search doesn’t find them, she has to confess to the police that her marriage isn’t all that it seems.
Even if that risks her own secrets being revealed…
An absolutely incredible, page-turning psychological thriller with a twist you won’t see coming, for fans of Gone Girl, Behind Closed Doors and Ruth Ware.

Love You Gone has been on my Kindle for a really long time and it was one I hadn’t really prioritised for whatever reason. I will say I was expecting a lot more from this one than what I got and I was slightly disappointed by the ending and how see through this story became. There were definitely some parts that were extremely interesting and others that dragged and a complete struggle to get through. If you put all of that together then you may realise that I wasn’t a huge fan of this book and I won’t be picking anything else up by Rona Halsall unfortunately. Which I’m actually pretty upset about, I was hoping I would have found a new author that I would love and be able to buy all of their books.

I think my biggest issue with the characters in Love You Gone was definitely the fact that they are the most see-through characters I have read in a long time. I wish that there had been more strength in their stories but I felt like not only were the characters underdeveloped but their back stories were as well. There was so much introduced and it was either oversimplified or skipped over and I ended up feeling more lost than anything else. I would have loved for there to have been more, so I could have either felt more shock or empathy when the ending came around. When I struggled through certain parts I would have loved to have the characters to fall back on and unfortunately that wasn’t the case.

To be honest I really don’t think there were any best bits in Love You Gone, it was an okay read all around but. nothing about it overwhelmed me either way. There was potential but none of it was acted on, so it was a little underwhelming.

For me the worst bits in Love You Gone was just the basic story, there was too much going on and it just felt unrealistic. I thought the characters were unlikeable which meant that I didn’t care what happened to them or how the story ended. It was a horrible feeling to struggle through a book and not care how it ended or how the characters ended. It was a tough one for me to finish and I did think about putting it down more than once but pushed through in hope.

No, I’m sorry to say I think there are some really good crime/thriller books out there and this just it unfortunately. There was too much going on and not enough development. I wanted more from this book but it left me unsatisfied.

Have you read this one? What did you think? Let me know!