Two Days Gone Book Review

Two Days Gone by Randall Silvis

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Blurb:

What could cause a man, when all the stars of fortune are shining upon him, to suddenly snap and destroy everything he has built? This is the question that haunts Sergeant Ryan DeMarco after the wife and children of beloved college professor and bestselling author Thomas Huston are found slaughtered in their home. Huston himself has disappeared and so is immediately cast as the prime suspect.

DeMarco knows-or thinks he knows-that Huston couldn't have been capable of murdering his family. But if Huston is innocent, why is he on the run? And does the half-finished manuscript he left behind contain clues to the mystery of his family's killer?

A masterful new novel by acclaimed author Randall Silvis, Two Days Gone is a taut, suspenseful story that will break your heart as much as it will haunt your dreams.

Review by Brittany:

I requested this book off of NetGalley because the blurb sounded interesting, and it fit in with my current suspense/thriller kick for reading. 

I did not anticipate loving this book as much as I did. DeMarco is a bit rough around the edges, dealing with his own issues and his own struggles, but he is such a great character. He's sharp, picking up on the subtle signs that are there for the reader but that I never noticed. He has good intuition and an understanding of the human psyche that makes him good at his job, and as a character, none of this is outside the realm of believability.

The book flip-flops between DeMarco's search for answers, and Huston's travels as a fugitive. The parts that are written from Huston's point of view are so intense and so shocking, illustrating how disconnected Huston has become after the tragedy of losing his family - and possibly being the cause of it. As a character, Huston is a best-selling author, and the reader learns about him through DeMarco's questioning of people Huston knows. In the passages where Huston is on run, he often draws the connection between himself and a character in the novel, separating himself from the reality of what has happened and basically writing his own story. It's an interesting way to show what's going on in Huston's head, and I loved reading those passages.

The end of the book has one twist after another. It's both what I was expecting and a surprise. Nothing is quite what it seems, and even the most unseemly of characters are given a bit of redemption in the book.

I really enjoyed this book. It kept me turning pages all the way through, and I found myself easily sucked into the story. This one definitely fulfilled my current obsession with suspense novels, and I recommend it to anyone who's interested in the genre.

Notable quotes:

...writing a story is like driving at night through a fog. The thing to do is to just keep moving.

Then he dried himself off and wiped the fog off the mirror, and just like that, the routine took hold as always, the mechanics of living, step one, step two, step three, and the wind-up man was moving again.