Book Review
Guess Again by Charlie Donlea
Thriller | Mystery
When you pick up a Donlea thriller, you know you are in for a wild and twisty ride, and Guess Again absolutely live up to those expectations. This is a fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat sort of read with short and snappy chapters that keep you flipping pages until the very final reveal.
Ethan Hall is a former detective turned ER doctor. When a previous partner comes to him with a cold case, Ethan reluctantly agrees to investigate. Soon, he’s drawn into the case of Callie Jones, a high school volleyball star who disappeared ten years ago. But can he put the missing pieces of this puzzle together before it’s too late? After all… some secrets are still worth killing for.
Known for having never failed to solve a case, Ethan undergoes a late career change and is now an incredibly caring and hardworking doctor (and he has a float plane license to boot). While I found his character a little unrealistic, I don’t mind suspending disbelief in thrillers, especially when it comes to super sleuths — and Ethan Hall was admittedly a fun and unforgettable character.
The king of red herrings, Guess Again was perfectly titled, constantly keeping me second guessing and trying to fit the clues together. Told mostly from Ethan’s point of view, this book flashes forward and backward in time. Donlea has once again crafted an intricate puzzle for readers to unravel with numerous characters and suspects, and yet, his writing makes it easy to follow along with.
As with most thrillers, I find this book challenging to fully review as it is definitely one to go into blind. But I will say, if you love non-stop action and slightly over-the-top storylines, this book delivers. And I, for one, could not put it down.
Dark and packed with suspense, I hope that this isn’t the last we’ve seen of Ethan Hall!
Recommended for:
Readers looking for a dark, action-packed thriller
This post contains affiliate links; as an Amazon associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Advance copy of the book provided courtesy of the publisher, Kensington Books. All opinions expressed are my own.
About the book:
(From the publisher): Ten years ago, 17-year-old high school volleyball star Callie Jones vanished from her quiet Wisconsin lake community. A highly publicized search followed but her body was never found. The case went cold, but the echoes still linger.
Ethan Hall, a former renegade detective turned ER doctor, left law enforcement to escape the horrors of the kid crime division. But on the tenth anniversary of Callie’s disappearance, his former partner, Pete Kramer, makes a desperate request. Pete is the veteran detective who originally investigated the case. Now he’s dying, and to ease his conscience and get closure for the Jones family, he needs Ethan to return to the haunting work he left behind—and solve what happened to Callie, once and for all.
Word soon spreads and everyone in the small town of Cherryview feels a rush of hope that answers will finally be found. Amid a sweltering heatwave, Ethan’s investigation gains momentum, but reexamining old evidence won’t be enough. He needs a new way into the case, no matter how dangerous or unconventional. And it comes from the least likely of sources—an inmate in a maximum-security prison.
Soon Ethan’s methods draw him deeper into a twisted psychological game. Because there is much more to the nightmare of Callie’s disappearance than he imagined, including a connection with his own dark past . . . and secrets that are still worth killing for.