by K.L. Slater

Audiobook Link: Safe With Me

Overview

I had high expectations for this story, it had great overall reviews on Amazon, but I was left feeling a bit let down. I paid £1.99 for the kindle version of the book and £2.99 for the Audible audio book. This book does mention self injury and might be triggering to some.

Story

Standard for books by K.L Slater, the main character is a female. This book takes place in the present and in the past, a theme that also sometimes appears in K.L. Slater’s books.

I must say, the title of the book made no sense to me throughout most of the story. I did not feel that anything was “tense”. The story flips back and forth between the past and the present, and in the present, the main character is Anna.

Anna delivers mail and has recently had her hours cut. She lives with her cat and is not very social. She doesn’t seem to really have any friends even though someone at her work has tried to spend time with her. She witnesses an accident with a car and a motorbike and helps the man at the scene. After that, is when the story starts to get a bit weird, it seems that Anna feels like she should be really involved with this guys life, far more than what most would consider reasonable.

It seems as though Anna might have some past history with the other driver in the car and motorbike accident, perhaps a really bad past history, but as with many K.L. Slater books, the reader is left to ponder for quite a while. I am always pretty bad at figuring out K.L. Slater’s foreshadowing, so as usual, I was left shocked at the end.

I think the author did a great job portraying the peculiarities of Anna’s personality, and by two thirds through the story I felt like the “thriller” part of the book really started it pick up. So while this was a book I certainly was able to put down, and at times had to re-read because I found it a bit boring, it was entertaining none the less.

Audiobook

The audio book was narrated by Lucy Price-Lewis. Lucy Price-Lewis has narrated many of the K.L. Slater books that I have read, and usually I think she does a very good job at keeping me interested. I also usually think she does a good job at differentiating the characters with her voice. In this story however, I do not feel like she did as good of a job. I actually had a difficult time figuring out which character she was by listening to her voice and found myself getting distracted thinking, perhaps I need to switch back over to the actual book to figure out what’s going on.

I think part of the problem in this book was that there were multiple female characters between the past and the present. The main character in the present was an adult female, the main character in the past was an adult female, in the past there was another female, in the present there were two frequent reoccurring females with a few additional ones that said a line or two. The voices for all the adult females seemed quite the same but otherwise I was able to differentiate easily.

Recommended For

Adults interested in psychological thrillers that are not easily bothered by reading about mental illnesses.