Lead Review (The Honeymoon by Rona Halsall)

  • Book: The Honeymoon
  • Location: Brighton, Menorca
  • Author: Rona Halsall

Review Author: tripfiction

Location

Content

Thriller set in MENORCA and BRIGHTON

Chloe works as a physiotherapist, she is good at her job. Her family is pretty unsupportive – her siblings have cut contact with her – and she doesn’t really have the support network of friends. She looks after her grandmother, although she receives no credit for that. And then Dan, carer to one of her patients, barrels into her life.

After a whirlwind romance, he proposes to her and she accepts. She feels treasured by him, for the first time in her life. They plan a honeymoon in the Maldives and when they arrive at the airport, he ushers her into the departure queue for a flight to Menorca (that should be Mahón on the Departures Board, but never mind). He manages to sweet-talk her into accepting the change of venue for the honeymoon, I mean, Maldives versus Menorca… (wouldn’t most of us have thought “there is a rabbit loose here” and high tail it out of there?). She is too biddable, and on the way to the remote villa he has chosen above Es Grau, the taxi stops to pick up provisions. She is clearly not going to get the wonderful dining experience she had anticipated, with swaying palms and rolling waves on her Maldivian island.

Gradually she comes to experience Dan as quite controlling and she suspects he is actually keeping her locked in the house. When challenged, he says there is a reason (a secret) and all he will say is that he has to keep her safe. Her phone has gone missing, and being the accepting young woman she is, she simply asks to use his phone (I personally would be up-a-height if I thought my phone had possibly been stolen but she is placid about the whole thing). As she starts to discover more about her husband, she realises that she knows virtually nothing about him and what she does discover in dribs and drabs is rather alarming.

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She, too, carries a secret, which, given something happened in her early twenties, could probably be put down more to youthful carelessness than something more extreme, But anyway, it is a burden she feels she must carry, which she has shared with no-one until now.

I felt committed to listening to the story, it is quite involving and it is well written. But I think overall there was just a level of acceptance on Chloe’s part that just didn’t feel tenable. And at one point, she thrashes around in the water with the deftness of a Ninja, carrying  out feats of extreme tenacity – this is an incident which serves to move the story along and felt pretty unbelievable. Overall, though I enjoyed the story, it has a really good level of tension and the ending is nicely rounded, given everything that happens to Chloe. I enjoyed the audiobook narration by Naomi Frederick.

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