Thank you Minotaur Books and BookishFirst for the chance to read this ARC. Book publishes on July 14, 2020. #TheSafePlace

Emily is a hot mess. Her acting career is going nowhere fast and she just got fired from her latest temp job. She goes home to find out she and her roommate are being evicted because the rent check bounced. Then, Scott, her employer who ordered her to be fired, has a job offer for her. He wants to hire her to be a housekeeper at a French villa where his wife and daughter live. She agrees and adjusts quickly to living in "paradise" but also feels that something isn't quite right.

What is Scott and his wife hiding? Why can't Emily go into the "main house"? Is she in danger? ( )

Intriguing introduction of this thriller. Spoken in the voices of two protagonists, Emily and Scott.

Emily is a character very relatable. She wants to act and is beautiful. She is a perfectionist, yet she doesn’t seem to do anything right. She is stuck in a shame cycle. She lost her temp job and has an over drafted account.

Scott is in investment banking. He is a bit mysterious and isn’t startled by the sight of blood. He has been keeping a close eye on Emily, making her do mundane jobs and seems she is perfect.

What could he want with Emily? It’s obvious it is something sinister. Whatever it may be Scott thinks Emily is the perfect candidate for his extracurricular job. I can’t wait for the ending to see what Scott is actually up to and how will the low self-confident Emily respond?

Updated 2/23/21

Emily became Scott’s wife and daughters companion/housekeeper/au pair due to an illness in his daughter. The mid section was a bunch of filler to me; however the twist at the end was not at all expected. What did Emily find out what is going on in this family? It kept me on my toes! ( )

DNF ( )

When a blurb invokes Ruth Ware and Lisa Jewell, it gets my attention. The Safe Place is billed as “atmospherically tense” with “morally complex family dynamics,” but it delivers something else.

A slow starter, The Safe Place begins with the decline of Emily Proudman, an adopted, down-on-her-luck young woman who has been let go from her job. She’s over-extended and begrudgingly about to turn to her adoptive parents for money when she gets an offer she can’t refuse from her dreamy ex-boss, Scott: a sort of mother’s helper job on a remote French estate that solves all of her immediate problems.

Emily falls into a natural step with Scott’s wife, Nina, and their daughter, Aurelia—until…

It’s hard to fully explain my complaints about this book without giving too much away, but there are painfully slow chapters where I had hoped what was being described would tie up to a shocking ending; there were tense scenes that, in the end, left me with more questions than answers about Aurelia’s “true condition,” Scott’s self-mutilation, and the Emily’s past prior to her adoption. I didn’t identify at all with Scott and Nina as parents, nor did I particularly understand Aurelia’s apparent hatred of Scott.

The author employs the usual tropes: a character’s basic needs overriding common sense, rich people and a Non-Disclosure Agreement, and a troubled, special needs child. It’s nothing I haven’t read before, other than that, in this case, it all falls flat.

The author sets up for a far more original ending than what’s delivered, and I can’t help feeling disappointed. While the writing, itself, is evocative and atmospheric, a great book is more than a collection of well-constructed sentences; it involves a cohesive, original plot. This one was just a bit too disjointed for me and felt like it needed a few more drafts.

Thank you to NetGalley and the author for providing an ARC of The Safe Place.

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You know how some people look so perfect on the outside, with their little social media representations looking like nothing bad ever happens to them? Some may be fooled by looks, but I'm not. I know how ugly humans can be on the inside, and how despairingly wretched their lives probably are.
This is the moral of the story in "The Safe Place." An aspiring actor living in London is fired by her boss from her temp receptionist job, only to be rehired by him as his wife's dogsbody, in their Midwest coast estate in France. A sprawling estate where she will be nanny, gardener, Animal minder, housekeeper, and work on the guest house that she is living in, getting it ready for a bed-and-breakfast.
But his beautiful wife is loca, her daughter is a disturbed, violent, mute six-year-old, and there's an awful smell in the main house. ( )