Don’t Let Him In by Lisa Jewell
I got this in the library app just a few days ago when I wanted something ad free to listen to while cleaning and doing jobs around the house. I ended up getting quite engrossed in it and listened to long chunks of it each day until I reached the end.
It was an entertaining story, partly because I am a big consumer of podcasts on romance fraud and scams and so perhaps is author Lisa Jewell. The antagonist certainly fit many of the tropes known in true crime cases, but this being fiction, it has some extra layers of nefariousness to make the story extra juicy.
It was fascinating to watch the man at work, spinning his tales, deftly deflecting suspicions. By his own admission, he enjoyed having to think on his feet and seemed to thrive on it where some of us would crumple under the stress. But it was even more fascinating watching things slowly unravel for him, and it got delightfully comical whenever the whole thing descended into a simple lack of object permanence.
Although some specifics were fairly outlandish, the overall modus operandi was realistic—it felt like so many of the real-life stories covered in podcasts and documentaries. That’s what made it compelling, the parts that felt real. What this book could give us that most of those podcasts and documentaries don’t is the antagonist’s point of view. And it was executed well.
The ending was good and fit the story. It could have easily been trite, but even those last paragraphs were full of emotion and weight.
I will be off to the library app now to see what else by Lisa Jewell I can find!
