The Wreckage by Robin Morgan-Bentley
Genre: Thriller
Read: 25th April 2020
Purchase: Amazon
(publication: 6th February 2020)
★★ 2 stars
When I read the premise for this book, I was immediately intrigued. A tragic event in which the driver of the car involved and the grieving family of the man he hit are drawn together as they each try to piece together their shattered lives.
Sounds intriguing, right? Wrong.
What I got was five hours of depressing monologue from both narratives that I cannot get back. I can't believe I stayed up into the night in the hope it would get better. The reason I did stick at it was that it was a short read (thank God!) and the promise of a twist at the end that I was eager to discover. And even that was somewhat anti-climatic.
But to be fair, THE WRECKAGE is about more than just a car accident. It is a story of dangerous love and obsession and the lives of those that are thrown together by this tragic event. And then the twist that is thrown in towards the end reveals that nothing is as it seems. A clever concept...but sadly the two characters were so unlikable that more than once I felt like stuffing them both in a bin bag, tying it off and tossing it in the river!
We meet Ben Anderson, primary school teacher, on his way to work at 6.40am one morning on the motorway in a deluge of rain and mist that you could hardly see the road in front of you. His windscreen was fogging up quicker than he could wipe it with the sleeve of his jacket as the heater was busted. The rain was falling faster than his wipers could go when suddenly he saw a flash of white in front of him...and then it was gone. Pulling over to the shoulder, he got out to find the crumpled body of a man about his age. What the hell just happened? Did he hit this man? Has he killed him? But where on earth did he come from? Beside himself with worry, Ben is taken to the police station to give a statement of events.
Alice Selby awakes on the same morning around 7.15am. She feels the cold and empty space beside her where her husband Adam should be. Donning a satin dressing gown, Alice descends the stairs and upon seeing no sign of Adam in the kitchen of living room, realises Adam must be in his "study", a shed at the bottom of the garden. But when she opens the door, the sight that greets her is one of disarray with papers strewn everywhere and his mother's porcelain lamp laying broken on the floor. As she steps inside, Alice sees the brown envelope on the seat in Adam's neat calligraphy writing with the words "Tell Maxy I'm sorry" on the front.
Springing into action, Alice pulls Max out of bed and leaving him with their neighbour, takes herself off frantically to the police station. All the while thinking "Not again". Suffering clinical depression and anxiety for most of his life and having a mother who suffered Bipolar before taking her own life, Adam has attempted suicide several times before. But this time is different. This time, when Alice gets to the police station to report her concerns, she is informed that her husband had stepped in front of a car on the motorway and was on his way to the hospital. He's alive? But that hope is short-lived when five weeks later she gives permission to switch off his life support. Adam was brain dead. There was no coming back from it this time.
Ben and Alice's lives first intersect when Ben, feeling so traumatised by the event, visits Adam in the hospital. Alice was shocked at first but then finds a kind of comfort in the kind man who so obviously blamed himself for making her a widow. But Alice knew it wasn't his fault. Adam chose to step in front of his car and end his life. Ben was just the unfortunate person to have hit him.
Then it starts to get a little weird and go downhill.
Ben starts to show a concerning amount of interest in Alice and her 7 year old son Max. He begins to follow her on Facebook, Googling her address to view her house on street view and turning up at the same mindfulness class. Then out of misplaced guilt, he starts to spend a little too much time with them. At first, Alice took pity on him and invited him to a small dinner party with friends. Then an impromptu breakfast of pastries for Max. In a flurry of WhatsApp messages, the two of them share a weird relationship as they try to navigate their way through their grief and feelings of guilt.
Then after a mindfulness class one evening Ben invites Alice for dinner. She thinks "why not?" and Ben takes her to a favourite Italian restaurant for what he sees as their "first date". Then as the evening comes to a close, Alice invites him back for a nightcap and the two end up tearing each other's clothes off and...well, you get the picture. But almost as soon as it happens, Alice is filled with regret while Ben is walking on cloud nine, believing that this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship. The narrative between the two of them at this point shows a complete difference in perspectives and expectations.
What has Alice got herself into? Who is Ben really? She hardly knows him and though she tries to let him down gently, Ben either doesn't take the hint or he has a more sinister agenda. He begins to stalk Alice, turning up where she least expects him leaving her wondering what the hell he is doing there.
Then something happens and all bets are off. What is Ben doing? What is he after? Was it misplaced guilt he's trying to assuage or has he actually been playing a longer, darker and far more twisted game all along?
Plunged right into the story from the first page, THE WRECKAGE is a twisted tale of obsessive love, loss and grief and certainly not what I was expecting. I did have a sense of deja-vu reading it with similarities of a kind to Gillian Jackson's "The Accident" which I have also recently read...although in the end, the two are completely different.
While it did start off promising, it soon tapered off to the point I was getting bored as the story didn't seem to progress and nothing was really happening...but most of all, the two main players were appalling unlikable people. Ben has this whole creepy stalkerish vibe going while Alice is just mean and foul-mouthed.
The twist, when it came, didn't really shock...more like had me raising my eyebrows and thinking "Seriously?" it was pretty unbelievable. But at the same time, it did reveal just how unstable Adam really was. Though he wasn't diagnosed as such, but given his mother had the condition, I had to wonder whether Adam suffered Bipolar as well with the addition of paranoid delusions.
With the exception of one chapter from Adam's POV, THE WRECKAGE is primarily told in alternating narratives by Ben and Alice, as the reader is given a glimpse into each of their perspectives with somewhat startling revelations...but no major shocks.
An average thriller, THE WRECKAGE showed promise to begin with but ended up as nothing wonderful. It was indeed disturbing, with a little twisted twist at the very end that left me thinking "What the...?"
**I feel I must include a trigger warning as the book does contain suicide, depression, anxiety, mental illness and domestic abuse.**
I would like to thank #RobinMorganBentley, #NetGalley and #OrionPublishingGroup for an ARC of #TheWreckage in exchange for an honest review.
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