Adele Parks is widely successful – she’s sold over 3million copies of her books – but The Image of You doesn’t quite pack the right punch.
It opens with a chatty prologue and then dives in with the discovery of a blood-smeared hotel bathroom, before a quick rewind to meet our protagonist, gentle Anna and her polar-opposite, spiky twin sister Zoe.
Anna is searching for Mr Right on dating sites and Zoe thinks she’s going about it completely the wrong way, but then Anna meets Nick and it seems Zoe was wrong.
If you want an easy-to-read page-turner, this is the book for you. If you want more psychological depth and a few more surprises, maybe not.
The story twists and turns fairly satisfactorily but it is a little pedestrian (which is disappointing in a thriller) and it’s riddled with stereotypes and cliches.
It feels as if several genres have been mashed together to make an unsatisfying whole.