Years ago, Rachel was a globe-traveling journalist with a hot career and her life put together. After a PTSD-related mental collapse, she’s become agoraphobic and has lost most of the people she was once friends with. The big exception is her husband, Brian, who has spent several years helping her to ease out of her comfort zone. Then a chance encounter one afternoon changes everything, and Rachel is thrown back into paranoia and fear. Only now, her fear is justified.

I’ll say this: Since We Fell was a far more engaging and intriguing thriller than I’ve read in quite some time. Similar to Stillhouse Lake, it focused on the psychology of someone who has experienced trauma and is struggling to cope. For a big chunk of the book, I honestly wondered if this would end up being a traditional thriller at all. It took a long, long time to get to the chance encounter and the actual thriller part of the book (about 160 pages). And I liked the book better before it went off on that route. I was quite enjoying the whole psychological bit.

However, even once the thriller part popped up, I continued to enjoy the book…up until the 3/4 mark of the book. One little happening – not even really a twist – was just too far out for me to suspend disbelief, and everything that happened after that point felt contrived and out of character. I sped-read through the rest, trying to salvage something. I nearly abandoned the book, and probably would have if I hadn’t been reading it during Readathon. It wasn’t that it was bad, it’s just that I didn’t believe it anymore. I couldn’t buy into the book after it veered way off the tracks. And it never recovered from that, for me. In the end, the book was just okay.