B. A. Paris -- Bring Me Back

In Paris' first two novels, Behind Closed Doors and Breakdown, the protagonists were women who were being victimized. In Bring Me Back, the protagonist is a male, who may or may not come off as sympathetic as the females in the previous novels.

The novel is broken down in three parts. By part two I was thinking this just wasn't as good as Breakdown, but the more I read the more the tension just kept racheting up until the final act. It's more of a slow build, while Breakdown was unrelenting from start to finish.

Our protagonist [not sure I'd call him a hero] is Finn. The book opens with his statement to the police of what happened when his girlfriend Layla disappeared while they were on vacation stopped at a rest stop. But at the end he lets the readers in on a little secret...what he's told the police isn't the complete truth. He lies because he's afraid if he tells them the truth they'll think he had something to do with Layla's disappearance. Even with his lies they still do and he's accused of killing her but he's able to get the charges dropped.

Each chapter of Part One goes back and forth between the past and the present until we finally learn what really happened that fateful night. What unfolds is that Finn can be a violent man with an out of control temper when he's angry. When his father refused to let him go out he put his fist through the door where his father had been standing and in college when he learned his girlfriend was in love with his best friend he had a violent encounter with her. It was only pure luck that he didn't seriously injure her. And that night Layla had made Finn very angry and while they were having a violent altercation it seems like he blacked out what happened as he remembers fighting with her then being in the men's bathroom and not knowing how he got there. Could he have killed her and just blacked it all out?

Anyway, twelve years have passed since Layla's disappearance and she's never been found. She's declared dead after seven years. And during that time Finn has gotten involved with her sister, Ellen, but even before the trouble starts he admits it isn't what he had with Layla and seemed to feel Ellen manipulated him into asking her to marry him.

Then into this semi-blissful life the trouble comes when a matryoshka doll is found outside their cottage. The nesting dolls had had a significant meaning to both Ellen and Layla. When they were children, Ellen had accused Layla of stealing the smallest doll and now Ellen thinks Layla has returned the doll she stole from her. And the night of her disappearance all that was left behind was the doll Layla carried with her. Is this Layla's way of telling them she's back and has hearing they intend to marry brought her out of the wood work?

What follows is more little dolls showing up, that Finn hides from Ellen, as he starts getting emails from someone name Rudolph Hill, who claims to be Layla. Finn flip-flops between Layla being back and someone playing head games, as he continues to keep more and more secrets from Ellen and the distance between them continues to grow. He becomes so paranoid he thinks his best friend and ex-girlfriend is behind it and pretty much accuses them both of playing head games with him.

What follows is a cat and mouse game between Finn and his tormentor that continues to push Finn to the edge and to make him think of doing the unthinkable.

As Part Three of the story begins I thought I had it figured out what was really going on, but it turned out even more twisted than I thought. The ending is sad and tragic and twisted but in a way it doesn't seem it could have ended any other way with Finn being who he is. There was just no way this could have come to a good ending.

Finn's final words as the novel comes to a close is the question readers will be left asking themselves when all is said and done.

Finn isn't your typical protagonist, because as I said, I really wouldn't call him a hero. He's a very flawed man that seems to be courting disaster from the moment he violently lashed out at his father all because he wouldn't let him go out for the night. In a way, it was like Finn was one of the male antagonists from Behind Closed Doors or Breakdown, only he was trying not to give in to his dark side. He was trying not to cross the line they'd crossed.

I was glad that this time a male was the protagonist. Paris might have pigeon-holed herself if once again a female protagonist was being mentally tortured by the antagonist. And she didn't disappoint. In a strange way there was no antagonist. There was no real bad guy in this story. They were just very dysfunctional people.

It seems with each new novel Paris tackles a particular theme. With Behind Closed Doors it was the myth of what appears to the outside world as the perfect couple and just how dark the truth was behind closed doors. With Breakdown it was not stopping to help someone in need and what would happen if you later found out something bad had happened to them and you might have been able to stop it if you'd only just stopped. And in this one it was the chance of having someone you loved and lost back and it turning into a nightmare.

I can't wait to see what Paris comes up with next. She's quickly become one of my favorite authors and she has yet to disappoint.