The Guilty One – Kiersten Modglin

Your husband was involved in a fatal accident.

One horrific sentence, delivered in an impersonal phone call, changes Celine Thompson’s life in a second. But when she’s asked to identify his body, what she discovers sends everything she thought she knew about her life crashing down.

This man is not my husband.

But who was the man who died driving Tate’s car? How did he have Tate’s possessions and, more importantly, why do they sport identical tattoos?

We’re going to find him.

When Tate doesn’t answer his phone or arrive home after the accident, Celine fears the worst. Still holding on to hope her husband may be alive, Celine is desperate to track Tate down and figure out what’s going on before it’s too late. The only problem? There are dark truths waiting to come out that are so atrocious she won’t ever be able to look away from them.

As she begins to put together the pieces of the mysterious day her husband went missing, it paints a picture of a man she never really knew. Is it possible Tate is still alive, or is she wasting her time searching for someone who will never be found? And if he is alive, how will they ever survive all that she’s unearthed?

With time running out, Celine must push the limits of the law and her safety to shed light on the secrets that have been hiding in the dark corners of their life together. In doing so, she may just uncover the final missing piece to the puzzle surrounding her husband’s fate.

Someone is lying.

Someone is missing.

Someone is guilty.

Review

Celine gets the call everyone fears getting—there has been a fatal car accident involving her husband. She was already consumed with worry and shock, but she was not prepared at all for what came next: the body she needed to identify wasn’t her husband… but he is still missing, and worse, when she starts to search for answers of his whereabouts, she finds even more questions: why was Tate hiding so much of his past from her?

I didn’t know where this was going to go because, since the beginning, I think it’s fairly obvious what’s going on regarding the main question of Tate’s disappearance.

We are on Celine’s head most of the time while she’s trying to contact every single person in their lives, then we switch from her POV to Tatum‘s POV, though most of the time we read from Celine’s point of view.

I really like how it finished. The plot development reminded me of Peter Swanson, especially in The Kind Worth Killing; you know how he writes his books showing his cards from the get-go and gives out clues for the reader to not be blindsided entirely, but you are still surprised? That’s what I’m talking about. I really like this approach in thrillers.

I haven’t read Bitter House, but I think it’s going to be my next read, either that or The Stranger, but I really like Kiersten Modglin. I think she’s up there with Freida McFadden in terms of authors that I’ve read the most. You can sense a theme with me.