Hello beautiful people! Welcome to a new review! On my continuation to make my way through Freida McFadden’s catalogue for this review, I get into The Inmate. As per her literary strengths, The Inmate is a twisty mystery thriller that keeps the writer guessing the whole time as we follow a single mother trying to understand what exactly happened when her friends were all killed one night when they were teens.
Main Characters:
- Brooke Sullivan: A young single mother who moves back home after her parents pass and she inherits their home, hasn’t been back to where she grew up for many years because as a teenager her boyfriend tried to kill her and her group of friends, being back is rattled with the truth that the past may have not been what it seemed when she takes a job working in the prison her attempted killer is held at
- Josh Sullivan: Brooke’s young son
- Shane Nelson: Was convicted of killing three of his friends and trying to kill two others one being his girlfriend as well when they were partying one night, is thrown off when he sees the woman who sent him to prison for life again when she becomes the in-house nurse, for the first time since it happened may be able to try and tell her his side of the story
- Tim Reese: Brooke’s childhood best friend who was there the night Shane tried to kill them, reconnects with her when she moves back to their hometown with their son
My Review
Having gotten into enough of Freida McFadden’s books now, I’ve started noticing a pattern in her work. It’s clearly a winning pattern, and she is so incredibly good at writing these riveting thrillers that you always want to know what comes next. The Inmate falls right into that category as well with questionable characters and a dynamic setting where you never see what’s to come around the next corner. I really enjoyed The Inmate, so if you’ve read other Freida McFadden’s work in the past, you’ll definitely like this one too.
I gave The Inmate an 8.5/10 rating overall. I felt like given how many twists there were in the book and how many different things it jumped to Freida did a really good job having it all come together to make sense. As it always is for me and her books I had a totally different idea as to how the book would end the whole time I went through it. Every time I thought I was smart and had it figured out I got proved wrong.
The book follows the perspective of Brooke who through the past and present weaves a picture of how she ended up with all the mental scars she has, and how it’s far from over. As a teenager who grew up with very strict parents Brooke had a desire to rebel and dating a boy her parents wouldn’t approve of was one way to do this. Further, she really liked Shane. As teens, the two seemed like kindred spirits despite their economic differences and it was a shock to Brooke when she had to testify against him not that long into their relationship. When having a party at Shane’s home one night three of their friends lost their life and Brooke and her best friend Tim came close to it. For the past ten years, Brooke has been trying to heal from that night and move on from the past. When her parents get into a deadly car accident Brooke decides to move her and her young son who she’s raising on her own into her parent’s home. To Brooke, it’s also an attempt to try and take back what Shane took from her all those years ago.
Stupidly Brooke takes a job at the local penitentiary and just hopes that she won’t run into her teenage lover who tried to choke her life out. When the two inevitably run into each other Brooke is thrown back into the past and is forced to question if her 16-year-old brain interpreted everything right that night, and if she was too harsh to think it was Shane. After re-kindling her friendship with Tim more from the past starts to come back to her and Brooke is forced to see if what Shane tried to tell her all those years ago may have some truth to it.
I thought having some of the setting be in a prison was really interesting. It gave this heart-racing factor to it in which every time Brooke did something she shouldn’t have, or overstepped the line you could just feel the excitement jumping through the pages. I mean without even getting into the book you can already assume that Brooke is not informing her new job of her connection to one of the inmates. I questioned a little bit why they didn’t do a background check or something but in the spirit of trying not to get too serious, I just moved on from that point. So, with her being in this place filled with dangerous men and one who wants to kill her we ask ourselves is this woman a gluten for punishment? It honestly may seem so. It also gave this coldness to the setting in which Brooke was on a different level than Shane is now. There is this division between them, and yet she puts herself in the place that she sent him to. I was instantly questioning if she believed it was him, but this early on it was hard to tell.
As it seems to be a common theme in Freida’s books she makes the main characters very ambiguous. I mean Brooke on the surface seems like a very sweet normal person. She went through trauma as a kid that she hasn’t fully healed from, is trying to raise her son with better values than her parents, and is just trying to make them some money with the only job she can get at the prison. The reality of it is though that she didn’t need to move back to her parent’s home. I understand taking her power back in the place that hurt her most but given that the only job she could find was in the place that the man who caused her that pain was in it almost kind of zeroed that power out. If it was me I would have said screw it and sold the house and just picked a new place to get a fresh start, but I also guess in terms of the book that angle wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun as the one Brooke takes is. It just threw some red flags up for me, and as the book goes on it gets hard to tell whether or not we can trust Brooke’s narrative, but it’s also the only one we are getting so there is lots to infer. Tim was an interesting character because Freida so far in the books I’ve read doesn’t often have friendships between genders. I liked him in the book because he was so clearly what Brooke needed to have in her life, but what she wasn’t allowing in. As I said before the girl is a gluten for punishment so it’s clear the pain that bad men cause her has something to do with her drive to them. I really questioned the whole time if she wanted to see Shane again because although she was saying she didn’t it sure seemed like she did to me.
Overall a really interesting read, and really unlike any other thrillers I’ve checked out before. If you enjoy a good thriller with a questionable person at the head of it all you’ll definitely need to check this one out. With a teenage romance scorned by weird history, and a town crawling with old a new secrets, it makes sense why Brooke’s life turns out to be so hectic. With the question of whether was it really Shane who tried to kill them that night at the heart of this twisty mystery, I would recommend adding this one to your to-be-read list. Have you checked out The Inmate by Freida McFadden before? What did you think?
*** Don’t go any further if you don’t want to see any spoilers***
Alright, so let’s get into the big question of the book did Shane really try to kill Tim and Brooke that night at his house, and why?
Well short answer, yes. The longer answer has a lot more to it though.
As we all maybe guessed early on in the book Josh is Shane’s son. Josh ends up playing a really big role in the book though in terms of some of the motivations that come up later. I skip a bit to the end here Shane’s mom (who turns out to be absolutely crazy by the way) hates Brooke’s father because he made it seem like he was going to leave his family for there when Shane and Brooke were young children. When he breaks it to Shane’s mother that he won’t be leaving his family for hers she loses it and essentially plots the long game on the Sullivan family. She convinces Shane when he is older that he needs to seduce Brooke so that they can kill her and make her father feel the pain he caused them. I mean damn Shane isn’t even biologically his like she needs to chill. This also explains why Brooke’s parents were so against her dating Shane, they knew some things she didn’t.
As we know things don’t work out and they don’t kill Brooke and she gets away and eventually sends Shane to prison. When Brooke sees him again when she gets her new job she lets Shane convince her that maybe it was Tim who did it that night. For a while, Brooke doesn’t believe it but when she and Tim start to rekindle their relationship some things that Shane says make her think it’s true. Skipping over a lot of things Brooke really starts to believe it was actually Tim when she finds the dead body of a woman Tim went on a few dates with before she moved back in his basement. This turns out to be Shane’s mother’s doing in an attempt to get Tim away from Josh and Brooke. With him around to protect them it made it so they weren’t as easy to manipulate. It turns out though Shane’s mom has been up to lots of things other than just putting the body in Tim’s basement.
Before Brooke’s parents died Shane’s mother figured out that Brooke had Shane’s child in secret and had been hiding him all this time. Now even more angry that Brooke’s parents have taken more from her she is desperate to get Josh and Brooke into her vicinity. She sabotaged Brooke’s parent’s vehicle causing them to crash in hopes it would bring Brooke back home. Then she called all medical offices other than the prison and gave Brooke a bad review so that it would be the only place that hired her. Then she changed her name so that she could be hired as the nanny for Brooke and Josh so she could spend more time with her grandson. Putting the body in Tim’s basement was also her way to try and blame Tim for the group murder all those years ago (along with some other things to get Brooke to recant her statement that it was Shane and change it to Tim). With him locked up and Shane out Brooke thinks she may have finally gotten her son’s father back for him after all this time. Little did she know that Shane and his mother fully planned on killing Brooke and taking Josh all for themselves.
Thankfully Brooke figures it out and spoils their plan. Well, Josh kind of does too. When Shane tries to take him from Brooke he takes him out into the woods. When Tim was a part of their lives he warned Josh that a bad man named Shane may try and hurt his mom, and if Tim wasn’t around he needed to protect her, so he did. In the woods, a chunk of snow fell off the top of Shane pinning him down. Josh takes a piece of ice, a big one, and gives good old Shane a few smacks on the head with it. He should have talked nicer to his mom on the phone that’s for sure. Everyone thinks Shane died in an accident and Brooke gets away from his mother. I mean everyone ends happy it seems although Josh definitely had some secrets. I wondered if this was maybe to show he was more like Shane than it seemed but I am not sure.
Overall just a crazy ending to the book and a ton of insane twists.
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