This was so close to hitting that 5 stars (its CAWPILE is 8.52 and I count >8.59 as 5 stars) but the more I ruminated on this, the more issues I had with the logic of it, so I think my star withholding is fair.
★★★★☆
Let's first go over the reasons I enjoyed this quite a bit. While it took me about 50% to warm up to the characters and the story, by the time I got to that halfway mark I was devouring this. The creepiness of the Bartholomew and the atmosphere created because of it, the connections between the characters, and the imploring feeling of I have to find out what happens next right now!! made this a very quick and engaging read. Jules wasn't my favorite thriller protagonist I've ever read, but she was all right. I really appreciated her background and how her traumatic past played into the decisions she made in the story. The background on her parents was horrific, if not completely original. I was surprised to find I was quite happy with the fact that Jane's disappearance did not factor into the story at all. I thought that at the last minute Jules would find a newspaper clipping that had one of Leslie's ads tucked into the pages of Jane's copy of Heart of a Dreamer. While I would have been okay with that too, I feel like keeping Jane out of the Bartholomew mystery kept the story more plausible because it would be too coincidental and didn't fit the M.O. (i.e. only choosing candidates with no family).
I will say I saw the other reveal that Nick and Leslie were mainly behind the disappearances and that Nick was the first doctor's great-grandson very early on. It almost seemed like the author didn't intend for it to be a twist but just a fact, because the breadcrumbs around it were so glaringly obvious. Other than that I was really fond of the side characters. Ingrid, Greta, and Dylan all played their parts well and kept me engaged in the story even when Jules was annoying me.
I try not to nit-pick thriller logic because I'm just there to have a good time and to be honest there has to be some suspension of disbelief for any story you read. That being said, I must comment on the fact that Jules has apparently never heard of a digital copy of a photo (this having been written in 2019) which stuck out as odd to me. More importantly, I know this is rather esoteric but the whole premise of the human organ black market concept was not plausible. Full disclaimer: I am a medical laboratory scientist so I deal with patient testing daily. In truth, it's not possible to have a small network of organ transplants because the likelihood of finding a match is so rare (this is why most people who need an organ like a kidney or partial liver look to family members, because the probability of finding a match there is much higher). Being a match for an organ is considerably different than blood donation; instead of just a blood type you have to do Human Leukocyte Antigen testing which uses an immense amount of sample and time. There's a point where Greta says Ingrid was supposed to give her a kidney but she disappeared and Jules was "also a match" so they used her. I don't know what they mean by "match" because matching organs is an extremely extensive process that could not be done in the amount of time in the book. I also assume they used the blood from Jules's fall for testing and it is completely ludicrous that a smudge of dried blood on a piece of gauze would be used for HLA testing. So even if they had had the time, sample, and resources to HLA match, the math doesn't make sense for Jules and Ingrid to both be a match to Greta. The coincidence is just too much. To that point, how did they happen to find any matches with just random people off the street? Insanity. I understand that most of the audience does not have this kind of medical background so the consequence of this oversight is negligible, but if you're going to write about a subject you have little background on, you should do the research necessary so that people who do have that background can't call you on how wrong it's written. Again, perhaps that's nit-picky and definitely it's not a widespread complaint, but the more I pondered the book the more whackadoodle the basis of the plot seemed. Still... I enjoyed the reveal that the Satanistic cult was actually a human organ black market for rich people, so even with all that said it only slightly diminished my overall feelings on the novel.
Final verdict: This is an engaging thriller with a satisfying reveal.
