PARALLEL LIES by Georgia Rose @GeorgiaRoseBook #NewRelease

4 out of 5 stars

*New Release*

On Amazon UK
On Amazon.com
On Goodreads

Blurb 

‘My name is Madeleine, Madeleine Ross. It is a name chosen with thought and because it is classy, and that is what is needed here…’

Madeleine Ross has life exactly as she planned it.
Cosy cottage, friendly village, satisfying job.
Company… when she wants it.

It’s an enviable existence for an independent young woman, and one she’s keen to protect.

Enter Daniel – strong, dependable and a danger to everything she’s built. He’s not something she was looking for, but hearts can’t be controlled and maybe, just maybe he might be worth letting into hers.

But, all is not what it seems. Because Madeleine is hiding a lifetime of secrets. Deep secrets.

And they never stay buried for ever.

Her darkest secret returns, like the proverbial bad penny. He is her first love, shadowy, dangerous, the baddest of bad boys. No matter how far she runs, or how well she hides, she can never escape him.

Or her past.

Here he is, on her doorstep, with a proposition she is powerless to resist but which could devastate the future she hoped to have.

Can Madeleine satisfy the old love while keeping the new?

You can’t always get what you want but, desperate to preserve the life she has worked so hard for, Madeleine is willing to risk everything to prove that she can.

My Review

How I discovered this book: I've got to know the author via the Twitter writers community, and was interested to read her new release ~ here she is on Twitter.

Parallel Lies falls in the genres of mystery and romantic suspense.  The main character is Madeleine Ross, who lives in one of those BBC Sunday night drama type villages, where she fits in very well ... or so it seems.  Right from the start, we realise that there is more to her than meets the eye, that she has big secrets about her identity.  She's an interesting though not a particularly likeable character, often cold, cynical and critical, which was a plus point for me; I admire any author who has the confidence to make her main character someone the reader will not necessarily warm to, and I enjoyed her astute observations about the pretensions and social hierarchy of the villagers.  

Because of the shocking and traumatic events in Maddy's past, she holds people at a distance.  She does not form romantic attachments but finds partners for emotionless sex amongst regulars at her local gym; one can only imagine the conversations in the men's changing rooms. Then again, part of her charm is that she cares little for what people think, or so she would have us believe; that she tries to convince us of this speaks otherwise.  And then the man appears who will turn her heart on its head....

I gave a big round of applause for the way in which the mystery unfolds; the information is fed to the reader at the right time, in exactly the right amounts, to hold the reader's interest and make them wonder what's round the next corner.  Just when Madeleine's new life seems to be on the up, a love from her past arrives. He knows everything about her and threatens to insert a particularly malicious set of spanners into the works.

There were some elements about the novel that stretched feasibility for me, but, of course, disbelief suspension ceilings vary from person to person, and mine is probably lower than most.  Recommended readers: anyone who likes an artfully unravelling mystery, heists, plenty of love life shenanigans and a fair few unexpected turns of event.  

About the author

Georgia Rose is a writer and the author of the romantic and suspenseful Grayson Trilogy books: A Single Step, Before the Dawn and Thicker than Water. Her fourth novel, Parallel Lies, encompasses crime along with her usual blending of genre.

Georgia has never found a TV series to beat her all-time favourite, ER, and nowadays only Game of Thrones or Ray Donovan stand any chance of keep her attention for any period of time. Her background in countryside living, riding, instructing and working with horses has provided the knowledge needed for some of her storylines; the others are a product of her passion for people watching and her overactive imagination!