Black-Eyed Susans

Title:Black-Eyed Susans

Author: Julia Heaberlin

Rating: 4 stars

Genre: Thriller/ Mystery

Number of Pages: 349

Publisher: Penguin

Publication Date: 2015

Summary: Seventeen-year-old Tessa, dubbed a 'Black-Eyed Susan' by the media, became famous for being the only victim to survive the vicious attack of a serial killer. Her testimony helped put a dangerous criminal behind bars - or so she thought.

Now decades later, the case has been reopened and the black-eyed Susans planted outside Tessa's bedroom window seem to be a message from a killer who should be safely in prison.

Tessa agrees to help with the investigation, but she is haunted by fragmented memories of the night she was attacked and terrified for her own teenage daughter's safety, Can she unlock the truth about the killer before it is too late?

I really struggled to get into this book. The main reason for this was that I found that rather than saying what was happening, it just seemed to dance around events and teased you with information to the point where you wanted to pick the book up and throw it across the room. If you picked this book up without reading the summary first, I really think you would spend the first 70 or so pages of this book wondering what was going on. For people who love suspense and being kept guessing this is the book for you. Me, would have liked a bit more information to understand what was happening.

However, once I got through the first part of this book I really, really enjoyed it. The mystery begins to unfold in a way that allows you to follow and make your own assumptions, pushing and pulling you on the right track and sometimes leading you down dead ends. This book was filled with an amazing amount of little details, and the past and present are highly intertwined in a way that shows the amount of thought and detail that Heaberlin has put into this book,

This book alternates in perspective between Tessa or present day and a younger Tessie following the events of her attack. By telling the story in this perspective, Heaberlin doesn't really have Tessa talk about the events of her past so much as she focuses on the present and the results of what happened all those years ago. The story told from Tessa's point of view was definitely more enjoyable as this was what told the bulk of the story and was were ultimately the mystery and thriller aspect of the book were present. This meant that sometimes the other chapters told from a different perspective sometimes felt a little irrelevant to the overall story and were almost acting as a filler or breaker.