ISBN: 1477817948
Publisher: Lake Union
Publication Date: 10/4/2016
Format: Other
My Rating: 4 Stars Welcome, neighbor! Julie Prentice and her family move across the country to the idyllic Mount Adams district of Cincinnati, hoping to evade the stalker who’s been terrorizing them ever since the publication of her bestselling novel, The Murder Game. Since Julie doesn’t know anyone in her new town, when she meets her neighbor John Dunbar, their instant connection brings measured hope for a new beginning. But she never imagines that a simple, benign conversation with him could set her life spinning so far off course.
We know where you live…
After a series of misunderstandings, Julie and her family become the target of increasingly unsettling harassment. Has Julie’s stalker found her, or are her neighbors out to get her, too? As tension in the neighborhood rises, new friends turn into enemies, and the results are deadly.
Advance Praise
Goodreads Big Books of Fall Selection
POPSUGAR Fall Must Read Selection
“In her latest novel (after Smoke), McKenzie stacks puzzle upon puzzle...Telling the story in alternating points of view, McKenzie is able to build suspense with two possibly unreliable narrators. She combines suburban angst with real danger to great effect, so that this novel feels like Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap crossed with Sophie Hannah. Recommended for fans of domestic suspense.” —Library Journal
“Nail-biting suspense, deep conflict, intriguing mystery, and a dose of romance...McKenzie's new novel is everything a good suspenseful read should be.” —RT Book Reviews, Top Pick
“[A] gripping thriller...What exactly occurred and who was responsible is the puzzle on which the novel centers, with important consequences to the various characters. The suspense grows, and just when things seem clear, they veer off in another direction.” —Publishers Weekly
“A contentious past leads a young couple to move thousands of miles from home to an exemplary family community when things go terribly wrong in Catherine McKenzie’s latest tour de force, Fractured. When tragedy strikes, everyone is a suspect, as McKenzie masterfully weaves together the stories of Julie and John: strangers who become friends, neighbors who become enemies. A tightly drawn narrative that begs the question: How much can we really know about those living closest to us? Truly riveting!” —Mary Kubica, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Girl and Pretty Baby
“After page-turners Smoke and Hidden, McKenzie is back with another gripping work that explores the limits of trust and the startling intersections of our lives. Tautly written and intricately plotted, Fractured will keep readers guessing until the final page.” —Paula Treick DeBoard, author of The Mourning Hours and The Drowning Girls
“Chilling and tense, Fractured is one hell of a twisty ride through the hearts and deeds of people who just might feel familiar enough to make us wonder about ourselves. And the punch at the end is everything it should be. A great read!” —Jamie Mason, author of Three Graves Full and Monday’s Lie
“Suspenseful, insightful, and cleverly structured, Catherine McKenzie’s Fractured is a page-turning pleasure. I couldn’t wait to find out what would happen next.” —Leah Stewart, author of The Myth of You and Me and The New Neighbor
“Fractured is a well-crafted, extremely addictive story that kept me turning page after page, eager to put all of the pieces together. When the secrets of Pine Street all click into place, you are left with a highly satisfying conclusion that I promise you’ll find yourself pondering long after you read the last page. This is definitely another masterful piece of fiction from one of my favorite authors, Catherine McKenzie.” —Emily Bleeker, bestselling author of Wreckage
“Beautifully plotted. Breathlessly paced. Fractured is a difficult book to put down. But its insights into love, marriage, and obsession ensure that you’ll be thinking about it long after you do. This is Catherine McKenzie at her best.” —Matthew Norman, author of We’re All Damaged and Domestic Violets
“Catherine McKenzie has crafted a tightly wound tale of complex relationships and engrossing psychological suspense. A finely wrought novel of human strength and frailty, cracked marriages and torn friendships, love and jealousy, Fractured kept me guessing until the very end.” —A. J. Banner, bestselling author of The Good Neighbor
“Fractured shatters the cheery facade of a Cincinnati community to expose the dark side of picket fences, block parties, and speed bumps. Think of it as a welcome basket with a ticking bomb inside. This page-turner of a mystery also features a novelist who may or may not be the neighborhood’s bad apple. A thrilling achievement!” —Neil Smith, award winning author of Bang Crunch and Boo
“Catherine McKenzie has quickly become a master of the psychological thriller, and Fractured is no exception. A taut, finely wrought novel that had me holding my breath from the very first page, unsure of where the twists and turns would take me but looking forward to all of them.” —Allison Winn Scotch, New York Times bestselling author of Time of Your Life and In Twenty Years
My Review
Canadian author, Catherine McKenzie returns following Smoke (2015), with her latest- FRACTURED, tautly written and intricately plotted; a writer haunted by a stalker from her past in a complex crafty psychological thriller (a book within a book). Welcome to the neighborhood! What lies behind the white picket fences and the façade of lives, marriages, and relationships. The dark side. Tragedy. A Stalker. Fractured lives. Secrets. Perception. Can you solve the mystery? A hurricane roars through Fractured, and I do not mean Hurricane Matthew (approaching here in South Florida). The winds are dangerous, as they twist in and out of the lives, creating havoc, turning them inside out. What will be left in the aftermath? Who is guilty, and who is innocent? Who proposes a threat? A neighborly distance. Keep them close or far away. Allies or enemies? Julie is a best-selling author. She, her husband, and two children move to a new community in Ohio to get away from a stalker from their older neighborhood. Julie has written a novel about the perfect crime and is attempting to write her second novel. After publishing her first novel “The Murder Game,” Julie’s life takes a change. Not only does the success from, the book brings in endless money, but also an unwanted stalker from her past. A neighborhood. Where nothing is as it appears. Told from two points of view Julie and John, (two narrators) –the same events from two different perspectives. One an insider and one a newcomer. Two timelines: a 12 hour day where a family is waiting to testify before a grand jury and the 12 months leading up to that day. John Dunbar is a handsome neighbor across the street. What starts as innocent turns dark. A complex plot with a deep layering of secrets and a nonlinear time frame. Tragedy strikes. Everyone is a suspect. We hear from Julie and John. Friends to enemies. Obsession. Do you really know your neighbors? What lies behind the doors?
Loosely based on her own experiences while at law school, in Montreal, “The Murder Game” follows a group of law students who plan and commit the perfect murder. Oddly enough, Julie’s law school friend Katherine died at a party one night, although her death was later ruled an accident. But the similarities between Katherine’s death and the plot of the book are all too suspicious to Heather Stanhope, another law student who is seen as an outsider to the group. After Heather begins threatening and terrorizing Julie, she decides to move across the country to escape her stalker and start a new life. From idyllic, to deadly. A neighborhood full of gossip, nosy people, rules, stay at home moms, threats- is there another stalker? She moved to escape and now the stalker has followed her, or is there another?. What happened the previous year? What tragedy? Misunderstandings. A target. The shocking twisted story is slowly unraveled. Love the integration of the author’s life and characters. A creative crafty way of storytelling keeping you entertained until the final ending. Chilling! Full of twisty suspense, we go back and forth in time. McKenzie, an attorney by day, and a talented creative writer in between, an entertaining ride! Look forward to reading The Murder Game by Julie Apple, coming Nov 1. Fans of Paula Treick Deboard’s The Drowning Girls, will enjoy this twisty psychological neighborhood suspense. Ideal for book clubs and discussions (included), and a great Q&A with my favorite author, Mary Kubica. A special thank you to Lake Union and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Review Links:
About the Author
A graduate of McGill University in History and Law, Catherine practices law in Montreal, where she was born and raised. Catherine's novels, SPIN, ARRANGED, FORGOTTEN and HIDDEN, are all international bestsellers and have been translated into numerous languages, including French, German, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Slovakian and Czech. HIDDEN was also a #1 Amazon bestseller and a Digital Bookworld bestseller for five weeks. She has also published a novella, SPUN, which is a sequel to SPIN.
ARRANGED has been optioned for film, and SPIN has been optioned for a television series. A short film of ARRANGED was made in 2014 and won a Canadian National Screen Institute Award. Catherine was on set while they filmed it. It was one of the cooler experiences of her life.
Catherine’s fifth novel, SMOKE, will be published by Lake Union on October 20, 2015. She is currently at work on her sixth novel, which is expected to be published in 2016.
An avid skier and runner, Catherine climbed the Grand Teton in 2014.
And if you want to know how she has time to do all that, the answer is: robots. Read More
