A review by evermoreau
No Place Left To Hide by Megan Lally

dark tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

megan lally’s debut novel was one of my favourite reads of 2024, so it is understandably difficult to live up to that standard. this experience was ridiculously similar to the one i had with holly black — the first story i fell in love with, the second story involved being stuck in a vehicle in the middle of nowhere & i found it at best mediocre. all of the plot twists of NPLTH were painfully predictable due to the heavy handed foreshadowing, to the point that the flashback chapters felt slow and redundant very early on, but without them serving as filler the book would have been even shorter, so i don’t know which is worse. the secondary characters were given too little development & depth for the reveal of their true role to feel rewarding or shocking for the reader, and brooke herself was similarly poorly handled, because at no point was i rooting for her since the story begun. it is difficult to make your protagonist both a spoiled brat & an interesting character to follow, and with a plot like this one it should have been a must. the reader’s disappointment/resentment of brooke should have been something gradually built, and maybe such was attempted, but i was annoyed by her almost from the get-go & it only grew with every mention of claire, who is presented as the foil to brooke & is genuinely the only one worth a second thought at all. i loved her when she was supposedly a horrible person & later when the puzzle pieces were fully revealed, which just proves that the author is capable of this duality. NPLTH attempts to do the same thing as the book in my dreams i hold a knife, which is to make the reader so attached to the protagonist that in the end it doesn’t matter what she did or didn’t do, but it fails where IMDIHAK succeeds. i think in the end the author gave up on pretending the protagonist’s journey that the reader was being shown for nearly 300 pages existed as anything other than the set up of a weak plot twist, and that’s why the ending itself is so rushed and devoid of satisfaction