Book Review: Tear Me Apart by J.T. Ellison

Tear Me Apart

by J.T. Ellison

Amazon | Books-A-Million | Barnes & Noble

SYNOPSIS:

The follow-up to her critically acclaimed Lie to Me, J.T. Ellison’s Tear Me Apartis the powerful story of a mother willing to do anything to protect her daughter even as their carefully constructed world unravels around them.

One moment will change their lives forever…

Competitive skier Mindy Wright is a superstar in the making until a spectacular downhill crash threatens not just her racing career but her life. During surgery, doctors discover she’s suffering from a severe form of leukemia, and a stem cell transplant is her only hope. But when her parents are tested, a frightening truth emerges. Mindy is not their daughter.

Who knows the answers?

The race to save Mindy’s life means unraveling years of lies. Was she accidentally switched at birth or is there something more sinister at play? The search for the truth will tear a family apart…and someone is going to deadly extremes to protect the family’s deepest secrets.

With vivid movement through time, Tear Me Apart examines the impact layer after layer of lies and betrayal has on two families, the secrets they guard, and the desperate fight to hide the darkness within.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

There is a nurse named Eleanor Snow who runs the ward, but we all call her Ratchet because she is a bitch. No one said we had to be original.

She doesn’t want to die. She feels the cancer moving through her, like a shadow in her blood. It has grown in the past few days, is becoming harder and harder to fight... Its snapping jaws are just there, out of reach, but for how long?

The words are absurd. This is one of those bizarre nightmares where you’re dreaming inside of a dream, and you know you’re dreaming, so you tell yourself to go ahead and wake up because this isn’t fun at all.

“Show me the Milky Way, Mommy. I want to see the candy bars in the sky"… She was so mad when she found out that the sky didn’t have chocolate in it.

Everything here is dirty; though it’s been cleaned, again and again, the stink of raw bleach hangs on every corner like a blanket. Bleach and fear, the prison olfactory. Plus the dirt of a thousand people, grimed into the history of the place.

 My Review:

There was much beneath the surface of this slowly developing and captivating story; it was maddeningly paced yet in the end, I appreciated the cunning and craftiness of the plot.  J.T. Ellison is an evil genius.  I had initially devised a theory of a terrorist plot but quickly abandoned that when I easily identified the culprit although I had no idea of all the complex twists and turns and nuances there were to this tale.  There were lots of clues as well as misdirections, yet the mounting incidents and the number of deceased in various cities and occupations were cleverly situated and although the deaths seemed incidental and easy to explain their occurrence was far too often to not be foul play.  The writing was top quality, engrossing, and flowed smoothly in an alluringly addictive and enticing manner and while I wouldn’t call it a thriller, it certainly held my attention and kept me well entertained and glued to my Kindle.  I also greatly treasured the recognition of Project Semicolon in the author’s ending notes.  

Empress DJ

About the Author

New York Times and USA Today bestselling author J.T. Ellison writes standalone domestic noir and psychological thriller series, the latter starring Nashville Homicide Lt. Taylor Jackson and medical examiner Dr. Samantha Owens, and pens the international thriller series “A Brit in the FBI" with #1 New York Times bestselling author Catherine Coulter. Cohost of the Emmy Award-winning literary television series, A Word on Words, Ellison lives in Nashville with her husband and twin kittens.

Visit JTEllison.com for more insight into her wicked imagination, or follow her on Facebook, Twitter @thrillerchick, and Instagram @thrillerchick