My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Many thanks to Net Galley, Random House UK, Transworld Publishers and the author for the ARC of this book.

#FinalCut #NetGalley

Let me begin with an apology to the author S J Watson, for having kept his phenomenally successful Before I Go To Sleep in the mountainous TBR pile for few years now. After reading Final Cut, I am cursing myself for not having gobbled up every work that the author has published.

I have raised my head from the kindle, walked around quite a bit and gave it a day before I could calm my heart to write this review. Of course, the burning eyes also needed a respite after that intense concentration to keep going and going and going in the race to finish and find the truth.

Alex Young is in Blackwood Bay, the last place she wants to be for a documentary film. The quiet fishing village harbors dark secrets with 2 girls missing and 1 having committed suicide, but Alex, suffering from a traumatic past that has left her with dissociative amnesia is determined to unravel the past and the reasons for her fugue state.

The past seems to be holding sway even in the present as Alex finds out about young 13 and 14 yr old girls being lured by drugs and booze for causes unknown. As Alex delves further into the mystery, clueless about whom to trust and battling her own fractured mind, the story becomes more murkier like the black waters surrounding the village.

Many characters get introduced into the story and there’s quite a bit of going round and round with almost all the people refusing to confide in Alex and talk about the missing girls but the final part of the story was cracking with menace, the atmospheric feel in the story adding to the chill factor.

As fans of psychological thrillers, the twists and turns can be fairly guessed at, but still the book was extremely compelling and riveting enough that I had a real hard time keeping it down for even a sec.

Well deserved 4.5 stars!




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For generations Blackwood Bay, a quaint village in northern England, has been famous only for the smuggling that occurred along its coastline centuries ago, but then two local girls disappear bringing the town a fresh and dark notoriety. When Alex, an ambitious documentary filmmaker, arrives in Blackwood Bay, she intends to have the residents record their own stories as her next project. But instead of a quaint community, Alex finds a village blighted by economic downturn and haunted by a tragedy that overshadows every corner.

Alex pushes on with her work, but secrets old and new rise to the surface, raising tensions and suspicions in a town already on edge. Alex’s work takes her to dark places and uncomfortable truths which threaten to lead to a deadly unravelling.