Mary Torjussen

THE CLOSER YOU GET is a wonderfully tense and twisted domestic thriller that had me on edge from the start. This tale of a workplace affair gone wrong is told from the POVs of Emma and Ruby, the wronged wife and the “other woman.” Of course, as it turns out there’s more going on than meets the eye! I enjoyed getting the perspective of both of these flawed and compelling women.

This was a gripping and entertaining read that had my stomach in nervous knots several times. The tangled web show more of lies and manipulation these characters created had me hooked, and how it all played out in the end was quite satisfying. Highly recommended to fans of domestic suspense!

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. show less

Her life is filed with hope and promise, until…

An aura of menace is subtle but persistent, and I am wondering how far HE will go in her psychological torture.

I really don’t like Joe very much. I think he’s a bit lazy and selfish, though Anne needs to make her needs know. The longer you wait to solve a probe the less the other person understands why you feel the way you do. Communicate people! lol

Not sure what I was expecting, but the tangled web Mary Torjussen weaves makes it hard to show more put the book down. The damaged characters all have a special role to play and are pivotal to the story.

Twisted, mess with your mind, psychological thriller.

I won the book and voluntarily reviewed The Girl I Used To Be by Mary Torjussen. show less

This is a psychological thriller that is hard to put to down, and despite the unassuming title, this novel goes from being a story about a seemingly innocuous meeting with a prospective client for estate agent Gemma to a full-blown harassment and sexual assault case. Gemma is the breadwinner of her family, with her husband being at home with their three-year old son, and while she is trying hard to deal with the mounting stress of running a company, she’s constantly dealing with the show more anxiety of an incident in her past. Suddenly she is very much alone in a world where she is being harassed by private messages and letters, and she is finding herself lying and wondering who she is becoming.
It’s so hard to review this without revealing a major amount about the plot but this had me quickly turning the pages because author Mary Torjussen has crafted the perfect thriller whereby she has weaved a story from the character’s past into one in the present day, and while I was reading I felt Gemma’s anxiety - and fear - all the way through. It really was compulsive reading.
I will also personally disclose that the initiating incident that Gemma experiences, the one that she feels she must run from, and the one that is the cause of so much tragedy (revealed in part 2), is something that I personally went through myself. I only wish this sort of thing didn’t actually have to be something that becomes the basis of both adult and YA fiction, but (yes, this is my trigger warning), sexual assault happens, and will continue to be a part of fictional and non-fictional works. As women start to fight back by talking about it, as now it is very much a topic of our time (there’s a line in the book acknowledging that once upon a time, it wasn’t talked about so easily), it has become different when we read about it too.
This is actually the second book released this year that I have read with this similar sexual assault issue.
The book is thoroughly engaging to read and I liked the ‘two parts’ that it was separated into, with the massive twist. I don’t know what I’d change it to, but for some reason I have an issue with the title, although I understand the concept of how we look back at what we ‘used to be’, feeling like we have changed so much, or looking at what we were back then, but I want something else to grab people by. This book is so good and too clever for people to miss. show less

This book is good but over-hyped. The MC, Ruby, is a woman who sees herself as “trapped” in an unhappy twelve-year marriage to Tom, an abusive, controlling and manipulative spouse. We meet her as she is preparing to leave Tom – her car is packed up with all her belongings and she is going to meet her lover. She tells Tom she is not happy and hasn’t been for a long time and she is leaving. She does not say she is leaving for another man. Ruby is surprised at how easily Tom lets go but show more we all know that an abusive, controlling and manipulative spouse would never let her go that easily unless he had a little something up his sleeve.

Go back eighteen months and Ruby is being interviewed for a new job as the PA to Harry, the Managing Director and Owner of a company manufacturing health snacks. There is an electric connection between the two of them – long story short, they have an affair, he encourages her to start a new life with him (never mind that he, too, is married, to Emma). They leave the office on a Friday (eighteen months later and back to where the story began), to meet up later at a hotel Harry has reserved for a week while they search for a new home together.

Ruby checks into the hotel and waits for Harry to arrive….and waits….and waits… and waits. It is unclear whether he has been in an accident. When Harry never shows up by Monday, Ruby goes to the office and assumes she will get an explanation there, but whoa – her ID card fails to allow her entry to the building and before she knows it she is handed a box of her personal belonging and notification that she has been terminated. From this point on, everything in Ruby’s life goes from bad to worse. Someone has spread the word among the local employment agencies why she’s been sacked, she is told that Harry wasn’t returning to work that week (the week that he and Ruby were to be starting their new life together) because he and Emma were celebrating their pregnancy and have gone on a holiday together for the week, Ruby can’t get a new job, she has no money, she has no place to live…..

Over the next few days and weeks Tom is supportive, even puts money into Ruby's account, tells her he loves her but basically goes with the flow and does not antagonize Ruby but rather woos her trying to get her to come home. Over the same period she feels that she is being followed, that the privacy of her living space has been violated, someone has pranked her setting up non-existing job interviews, and someone has posted her number and personal details on a sex site.

Things go from bad to worse, Harry’s behavior is uncharacteristic, but Ruby is unable to speak with him. Next we see that something else in going on behind the scenes. A few months earlier, Emma has suspected that Harry is having an affair with Ruby and she follows him to the airport where Harry is leaving for Paris and sees that he is not traveling alone…furious she goes to tell Ruby’s husband what she has learned and soon she too falls into the web of deceit.

None of the characters are really likable – each behaves badly so it’s difficult to sympathize with any of them.

This is a rapid page-tuner but not heavy on the suspense, mystery, or psychological thrill.

Ruby was basically a doormat who got lucky in the end. Emma saw her husband for what he truly was and both Tom (Dick?) and Harry got nothing less than what they deserved (no person named Dick here but double entendre intended). show less