**Many thanks to Scene of the Crime, William Morrow, and Eleanor Barker-White for an ARC of this book via NetGalley! Now available as of 2.27!**

Lucy was so thrilled to FINALLY be pregnant...but even more excited when she discovered she was having twins. She had the names picked out (Eden and Eli) and the pregnancy was the center of her world...until one day, the unthinkable happened. Lucy experienced what is known as Vanishing Twin syndrome firsthand, where one twin embryo absorbs the other, leaving the second embryo 'vanished'...and leaving Lucy devastated and mourning the second twin who would never be born.

Many years later, she has worked through her grief and thrown all of her energy, attention, and love into the Twin Who Lived, Eden. Eden can be a bit of a handful, and Lucy has always been jealous of Eden's back-and-forth banter with her father, but overall she manages to put those feelings aside and fights to be the best mother she can. So when Eden doesn't return home one day, Lucy's motherly intuition tells her that something is wrong...and she is absolutely right. Eden is found by a body of water, nearly drowned, but she has survived, and doctors determine that she hasn't suffered any brain damage or sustained ANY significant injuries at all.

But there IS one major development: Eden asks...well, actually DEMANDS...to be called Eli. This aside, she starts behaving strangely, getting a bizarre haircut, and no longer feels the 'Eden' her family and friends knew. Lucy knows that something is wrong, but there's something strangely satisfying about 'Eli' and she starts to wonder if Eden's journey into the deep may have actually been the conduit to bring her lost baby back to life. But does 'Eli' have dangerous intentions? Is this NEW version of Eden determined to eliminate all traces of her former self... no matter WHO might get hurt along the way?

Vanishing Twin syndrome is not a trope I often see in thrillers, so I was intrigued enough to give this debut author a try, and at first, I felt fairly confident this was a good decision. The opening chapters of the book (until about 30-40% or so) were intriguing, with the detailing of Eden's strange disappearance, her time in the hospital, and the chilling behavior displayed once she returns home. We are given some background on Lucy (enough to make you as the reader question her mental acuity, that's for sure!) and also the strain in her marriage, etc., so there was a lot of emotional push and pull to balance out the suspense, and the book at this point was giving me sort of the 'bad apple' vibe of stories The Omen, where an evil spirit has infiltrated the child (or in this case, teenager) and I have to admit, I had NO Idea where this was going or what to expect from the rest of the read.

Well when it came to what to expect...the answer was "not too much."

The second half of the book almost got to the point of redundancy, as we trod over the same territory over and over with Lucy's issues which includes her spiral into her 'accepting' Eli (?!)...but then the bodies start piling up too. There are lots of unnecessary deaths that seem sort of randomly thrown in to create more tension, and to say there is an inadequate level of follow through from the police is probably a wild understatement. I was baffled by the way some of them were glossed over, and also couldn't understand why Eden's best friend Charlie had to have so many sections of narration. The author made an effort to have these sections truly feel they were written by a teenager...but it just didn't work. On top of all of this, we ALSO get glimpses into LUCY'S tortured past (going back to her childhood and a traumatic incident) and even all of this felt more red herrings than fully-formed backstory. I still clung to hope that all of this was leading somewhere...

And then came THAT kind of epilogue.

You know the one I mean...the kind that makes you want to actually HURL the book across the room.

I haven't had one of these in a while, and I honestly forgot how terrible they can be to read, especially when you were HOPING the last chapter would be the end of it and you just keep asking yourself "Why?" I don't often do this, but I actually felt a compulsive need to lower my rating for this book based on the ending alone. Not only is it unsatisfying, but it pointed out JUST how many loose threads there were throughout the story and made me question WHY I'd stuck with this one at all.

But by the end I think that my interest, my patience, and my appreciation for this premise might have gone the way of Eden...

...

Did anyone happen to look for it at the bottom of the river?
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