Seven Days

Wow! Just wow. I have been looking for a good kidnapping story and this just topped my list! I stumbled upon this one when searching for hours looking for a book on my kindle for my next read. I’m a sucker for a good kidnapping story with an HEA. I don’t like the ones about being murdered and then it becomes a story focusing on finding the kidnapper/murderer. This one didn’t disappoint! Now I never know if if there will be an HEA when I start a book. I just have to hope no matter what the ending is, that I’ll be satisfied with it. So I don’t want to give any spoilers if it does or doesn’t because this book kept me listening from the 1st page to the last so it didn’t matter. Only stopped to sleep for a little bit. I worked, went to the store, ran errands and still had my earbuds in listening. It was that good. It starts out at the beginning where Maggie is taken from an older man. She is 15 at the time. He puts her in his makeshift cellar below the garage floor. The book goes back n forth in time and different POV. It was done so well that you could follow very easily. You felt the emotions of the parents and the brother. Maggie has a son name Max who she birthed in the cellar. He’s one week away from being 3 years old. Maggie knows what happens when her babies turn 3. The MAN takes them away only for her never to see them again. She has already gone through it twice before. She knew she would not survive it happening again. She had 7 days to figure out a plan to save her and Max, her almost 3yr old son. What I enjoyed is the story wasn’t about those 7 days. It would go back in time and let you know what the parents were doing say 4 yrs after her abduction, 8 yrs after, etc. and we got to see her brother James spiral out of control, her mom going through another rough ordeal, the dad just holding the family together and missing his Maggie. We even get the detectives POV throughout the years. Anyway, you will not go wrong getting this book. I did audio and I loved it! I’m defiantly keeping this author on my top list!

Author : Alex LakeSeven Days420 pages3 ⭐⭐⭐Description:A race against time to save her child…In seven days, Maggie’s son, Max, turns three. But she’s not planning a party or buying presents or updating his baby book. She’s dreading it. Because in her world, third birthdays are the days on which the unthinkable happens… she loses her child.For the last twelve years Maggie has been imprisoned in a basement. Abducted aged fifteen, she gave birth to two sons before Max, and on their third birthdays her captor came and took them from her.She cannot let it happen again. But she has no idea how to stop it. And the clock is ticking… 🔪MY REVIEW🔪The story line was totally great. It was how it was wrote that was the problem. Jumping from past to present and being told from all of the characters. I have never read anything like it and hope never to again. It was very confusing and extends out over a 10 year period. Being told from the view point of every character made for a whole bunch of things being repeated. That become annoying very fast. There was also so many unbelievable parts throughout the whole book. This could have been such a great book had it been wrote different. I had to get out a notebook and by the end of the book I had used half of my notebook . Even then i was still confused at times. The only reason i finished this book was because i wanted to know what happened to Maggie and her 3 year old son Max. I have always loved everything this author wrote but this was a confusing crazy mess. It left me unsatisfied and with many things unanswered.

**Slight Spoiler**I really like this author and their books. However, this wasn't one of my favorites just because the story was a little unbelievable. Basically, the main character Maggie gets kidnapped at 15 (and is held captive in a bunker type room). This part of course is totally believable and reminiscent of the book Room. However, 12 years go by...Maggie gives birth to three sons (and every year, the perp/kidnapper/rapist Mr. Best (loved the imagery of him because he totally creeped me out!) takes each son on their third birthday. Still believable, horrifying....very riveting. However, what is not believable is that Mr. Best is an old man. I'm sorry but no matter how big and bulky this 60+ year old is...he is elderly...I just don't believe he would have had the physical strength to always restrain, fight and hold off Maggie. The other unbelievable part was Maggie's family who unbeknownst to them is hanging out with her kidnapper quite suddenly after she is taken captive. The police are suspicious of him (he has a past of beating up his wife and taking pictures of young girls and boys), but yet, they don't even alert Maggie's family that they are hanging out with a sex offender? The detective just kind of goes, hmm...that's weird. Kinda of like duh....You would think that Mr. Best would be their main suspect or they would at least give the family a heads up. At the end, it's like a big, OH!!! It's him. Mr. Best did it. LOL....I still will read this author's books. Good writing...just made me want to hit myself in the head at the end.

I've read several books by Alex Lake, and I run into the same disappointment in nearly every one. The story has an intriguing beginning, and the build-up of suspense is right on target. But the climax is abrupt and the denouement is written in a very sparse and businesslike manner. So I feel as though I bought into a really meaty story, but at the ending, where I'd really like to hear more about how the characters feel and have been impacted by what has happened to them, I don't get much bang for my buck.

I thought the book was really good, I read it in 2 days - I couldn’t put it down. I’ll be checking out more of Alex Lake books for sure.

The unthinkable horror in this book goes beyond anything physical. I had to actually shake it out of my mind each time I read some chapters, the last few of which caused me to read well into the wee hours.

I did enjoy this book, I found some of the scenarios to be somewhat clichè and it reminded me of an autobiography of a similarly nature so the story felt familiar. However, I did get through it very quickly and it was still entertaining. The story line is terrifying and it is a good suspense novel with notes of horror too.

Satisfied

This is a book that several of my fellow reviewers raved about over a year ago, and it's been on my to-read list ever since. So you could be forgiven for wondering why on earth it's taken me so long to actually get round to reading it.The simple answer is that instead, I read his next book 'The Choice' first, and was left feeling underwhelmed and thinking that the sea of hype into which it seemed to launch was not really warranted. I'm not saying that it was bad enough to leave me unwilling to read anything else by the same author - that would be way too harsh - but enough that I was in no particular hurry to do so. Indeed, had it not been for a challenge to "read a book that takes place over a specific time period", 'Seven Days' might still be languishing somewhere near the bottom of the pile.This would have been a real shame. Because, wow, this book really did deserve all the hype it got.It begins in a basement, where Maggie Cooper has been imprisoned for the last twelve years. Her son Max, who she was forced to bear by her abductor, turns three in seven days' time. Max is her third child. Her two other sons were taken by her kidnapper on their third birthdays and she has never seen them since. She can't bear the thought of the same thing happening to Max, but how can she possibly find a way to stop it before his birthday arrives?As the days pass, the tension mounts. Efforts to reason with her abductor meet with point blank refusals, and an attempt to overpower him fails badly. But Maggie loses none of her determination. She can't. Because her and Max's love for each other means that anything else is unthinkable. They are, quite literally, each other's world. The reader feels for them both, can clearly visualise what they are going through and screams at Maggie to think of something.Interspersed with these chapters are flashbacks to Maggie's abduction twelve years earlier, and the effects it had on her dad Martin, mum Sandra, younger brother James and investigating police officer, DI Jane Wynne. The parents desperate drive to keep going, to keep functioning despite their inability to sleep, just in case their daughter is found alive. James' inability to form a relationship with a woman, because to do so makes the loss of his big sister feel all the more real, and his descent into drink and drugs because they manage, however briefly, to ease the pain inside him. Ultimately, this peaks in two incredibly poignant and powerful chapters, in which James contemplates suicide because he thinks his parents don't deserve the son that he has become. And then immediately, we watch as Martin can do nothing but cry uncontrollably at the thought of losing another child.Meanwhile, DI Wynne can't forget the case, and not just because it was one of her earliest as a DI. But also because she has received anonymous letters almost once a year after it. After four years, she leaps on a possible lead with every ounce of energy she possesses, only to come to a dead end. I was inside her head, sharing her frustration and sense of failure as she bought those two bottles of wine on the way home from work.I wanted to reach out and hug them all. And scream in their faces.Because we know something they don't. We learn, fairly early on in the book, who the abductor is. And we watch in almost open-mouthed horror as a true psychopath works his way into the other characters' lives.Eight tenths in and I was absolutely glued to the book, wanting to race to the end and yet at the same time, not wanting it to finish. However, when the ending came, it was somehow just a bit less satisfying than everything that had led up to it. The problem is not the pace, because this really couldn't have been anything different. It's the fact that, ultimately, its what we hoped for but also expected. There is no final twist. And in a book that's marketed as a "psychological crime thriller", this is a significant omission.I thought, briefly, about deducting half-a-star for this, but this really didn't seem fair when every single one of the other chapters are that good. I also thought about summing the book up as a sort of 'Room' by Emma Donaghue meets 'Then She Was Gone' by Lisa Jewell, but that wouldn't be fair either. It deserves recognition in its own right. Therefore, I'll simply say that it's amazing and add my own five stars to all of the other, well-deserved, rave reviews.

I Haven’t read anything by this author before but will definitely be investing more time into their books! The storyline itself was truly gripping, there were times when I sighed heavily out loud over a characters actions, rubbed my temples at the near misses and at one point I genuinely wanted to throw the book (all for the right reasons, technically) but what I absolutely loved the most was the way the chapters were structured - as you can see from the blurb, a teenager is kidnapped and held prisoner; what the author does is essentially make you, the reader, lose track of time the way the main character has - rather than chapters 1-100, the author jumps around different timelines, different character perspectives and the ‘chapters’ never when passed 7, maybe 8, so you’d read ‘chapters’ 1-4 through one characters eyes, then chapters 1-3 in another timeline and so on. I’ve never read a book with this concept of storytelling and I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed it, excellent delivery, deserves being put on my top shelf (I only allow my favourites that high on my bookcase and out of the 50 books I currently own, only 4 sit on the top shelf, soon to be 5!). Again, brilliant read, highly recommended