My Sweet Girl by Amanda Jayatissa (2021) Psychological thrillers live or die depending on two key factors.......
Factor #1 - Their readability.......does the author make the story urgent and compelling enough to make you to flip the pages at supersonic speed, even if it means keeping you up til 3 in the morning? Or does the book bog down in endless overly descriptive internal monologues that have you roll your eyes and start skimming through that dense forest of verbiage to get to the good stuff......
Factor #2 - The Big Twists (or multiple medium-sized twists) Does the author astound you with his or her cleverness and guile by detonating twists that you never saw coming or even hoped to guess and leave your jaw dropping to floor level faster than a Warner Brothers cartoon character?
We're more than happy to report that "My Sweet Girl" checks off both those factors......and does so with a freakin' vengeance.
Our narrator here is Paloma Evans a young woman who was adopted from an orphanage in Sri Lanka by a wealthy San Francisco couple who live a globe trotting life as child welfare activist-benefactors.
But not quite a fairy tale life that you'd imagine - Paloma's lost access to her parents' funds while they're off on another world tour.......and Arun an illegal Indian immigrant she befriended and took in as a roommate, stumbled across her deepest darkest secret that relates back to her days at the orphanage.
Arun's blackmailing her with this explosive information........that is until Paloma finds his dead, murdered body in her apartment, along with a sighting of a dreaded ghostly woman who supposedly haunted the orphanage she came from.
And in true Hitchcockian style, after Paloma flees the apartment and brings in the police......there's no body to be found, or even a trace of one.
That's as much detail as you'll get from us, other than the continued gaslighting of Paloma reaches ever maddening heights......with alternating chapters that slowly but inexorably reveal a host of creepy, dangerous and downright horrific things going on during Paloma's childhood as an orphan.
All of these unsettling events finally tie together in what we can only describe as far and way the best thriller BIG TWIST we've read in this or any other year. It's unquestionably a guaranteed pop-your-eyes-out, jaw-to-the-floor, what-the-hell-did-this-book-just-do humdinger of a reveal. You'll literally gasp......
And for that cherry-on-top that all thriller authors love to deliver on the last page, a nasty ironic (but not altogether surprising) stinger wraps it all up to perfection.
For any reader who can't resist losing sleep over a book like this one, either strongly suggest that someone put it on their list of holiday gifts for you......or just gift it to yourself right away......cause BQ's giving it 4 and 1/2 stars (****1/2)
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