Review: STRANGERS by C.L. Taylor

Strangers by C.L. Taylor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ursula, Gareth and Alice have never met before.

Ursula thinks she killed the love of her life.
Gareth’s been receiving strange postcards.
And Alice is being stalked.

None of them are used to relying on others – but when the three strangers’ lives unexpectedly collide, there’s only one thing for it: they have to stick together. Otherwise, one of them will die.

Three strangers, two secrets, one terrifying evening.

The million-copy bestseller returns with a gripping new novel that will keep you guessing until the end.

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I'm a massive fan of C.L. Taylor's psychological thrillers, and while this one was really good, I think I prefer some of her others. This is just a personal preference--and it's mainly because I'm not a huge fan of books written in third person present tense and I'm so used to Taylor writing first person narrative. Third person present is always something I find harder to get into. It just doesn't grab me as much.

Having said that, this is still a great book--and I can totally see why Taylor used third person present. It does work for the book.

STRANGERS centres around three strangers who've never met before, but live and work in the same area. It's a gripping story of secrets and stalking, of how you can never really know another person, and the things we all keep hidden.

This book was such a mind-trip! So many times, I had no idea who the villain was. Taylor is a master of this, setting us up to think one thing, then revealing it's actually another. And until the ending, I honestly had no idea exactly what was happening, until we're given the climax. Then everything in the book came together wonderfully and made sense. From about the 66% mark, I couldn't read quickly enough! I was flying through the ebook.

As we've got three POV characters, each with their own storylines, we end up with A LOT of characters. At times, I found it hard to follow this, and I kept getting a little mixed up. The climax, however, involves all the characters from all three narrators' perspectives, and so there were a lot of characters in that tense scene. I found myself having to concentrate super hard as I read to check that I was understanding everything.

I loved the ending. It's really good.

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