BJ’s Standout Reads September 2022
The Overnight Guest by Heather Gudenkauf This is the last book I read on my summer vacation, so you may have seen me talk about it in that blog post. Wylie is a true crime author and she moves into a house in Iowa where a horrific crime took place. She's researching the story about the murders that took place there so she can write about it in her book. Most of a family was killed, the mom and the dad were brutally murdered in their beds but the daughter escaped and they didn’t know at first what happened to the son. So the story is written in the braided technique in which there are 3 distinct stories building and you know that they are all going to eventually collide. In Wylie’s story she’s caught alone in this house in a terrible snowstorm when she goes outside and finds a child laying in the snow and she has to figure out who the heck this child is. In one of the other stories it’s told from Josie’s point of view, she was the daughter who survived the shooting. So Josie talks about running from the house and the immediate aftermath of the murder, and how on the night of the murder her friend was sleeping over. When she's running away the friend fell and Josie kept running and then she had no idea what happened to the friend after that. Then in the other there’s a woman and her young daughter who are living trapped in a basement. At first you're like, 'who the hell are these people now?' When the three stories eventually it’s pretty awesome. Great Read.
BJ Knapp is the author of Beside the Music, available for purchase here. Please sign up for the Backstage with BJ Knapp mailing list to get updates on events, signings, dog pictures and so much more.
added on 11.02.22