Reviews - Don't Let Him In

2.25k reviews for:

Don't Let Him In

Lisa Jewell

3.72 AVERAGE

boonana's review against another edition

3.75

mysterious medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

allisonhollingsworth's review against another edition

3.0

challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Don’t Let Him In // “The world, she now knows, is not what it seems. Nobody is what they seem. Everything is an illusion.” // In a nutshell, this is a thriller book that sucked me in at page one but sort of fell off in the middle. It has multiple POVs and the chapters are pretty short so it’s really easy to keep reading. The main character — well, the protagonist, anyway, is named Ash, and she’s going through the death of her father. A man pushed him under a train, tragically. A year later her mom is starting to date someone new — a man named Nick who sent them a consolation letter after her father’s passing, claiming to have known him. The other main character, the antagonist, is not a nice guy. He is cheating on his wife and basically stealing money from her for himself. And he married her after his husband died… see where this is going? Yeah, so did I, pretty immediately, and knew I couldn’t trust Nick. But it’s like the author wants you to put those pieces together quickly and it doesn’t lessen the tension but increases it. A really interesting style choice the author makes here is to have Ash’s POV in third person and the man’s (he seems to have so many names we really don’t know his real one until the end; it’s Simon) in first person. The intent there is that you’re REALLY close to him, and in his brain, which is terrible but unnerving, to be in someone with his mindset. You also get a third person POV of Martha, the guy’s old wife. You sort of have three different timelines: 1) the man’s POV when he is cheating on his wife with Martha; 2) the present timeline of Martha’s POV when Simon (her husband) is starting to act different, and; 3) the present timeline with Ash. It’s like this guy is on a cycle to jump to a new wife every few years. But I didn’t really get what his motive was — not necessarily money, because he spent it all on his new woman friend and was basically broke as well. And I also couldn’t believe how all of these women just started giving him what he wanted just because he dropped a smile or made them feel bad for him. Like the second he was trying to get my money I’d think he was a sleazeball. Maybe when you think you love a person so much you’re blinded by them? But as the reader, I wasn’t convinced. By the middle of the book there were so many women that he’d swindled that I was like really?? Come on. The author tries to sew some doubt in the reader about Ash by giving her a backstory that makes it seem like she wasn’t trustworthy. She has some mental health issues and was accused of making up a stalker. That turns out not to be true though and at the end ash finds out that the paper he wrote her a letter on is identical to the one her stalker was using, and I think it’s implying that Simon is the one who ruined her reputation? Also in the letter he says that her dad was not this great guy she made him out to be in her head, which was true and apparently both her parents were cheating on each other. But Ash gets the final word because she does all the hard work to round up all of the women and people he’s swindled and confront him. Even while his ruse is exposed he manages to slip away from police. The book ends with him returning to one of his old wives but she actually tricks him and he’s arrested by police. Thank god. If this book ended with him actually escaping and having a happy ending I would have lost my mind. I sort of wish this book had a bit more mystery to it; we had it at the beginning but halfway through we really catch on to what Simon is doing and most of the book is just rooting for him to get caught and revealed. It was satisfying when it eventually happened but I felt frustrated most of the time, so it wasn’t the most enjoying reading experience.