The Guilty One

• Author: Kiersten Modglin
• Genre: Mystery/Thriller
• Publication Date: September 3, 2024
• Publisher: Dreamscape Media

Thank you to libro.fm and Dreamscape Media for providing me with an ALC of this audiobook. I am offering my honest opinion voluntarily.

Your husband was involved in a fatal accident.

One horrific sentence, delivered in an impersonal phone call, changes Celine Thompson’s life in a second. But when she’s asked to identify his body, what she discovers sends everything she thought she knew about her life crashing down.

This man is not my husband.

But who was the man who died driving Tate’s car? How did he have Tate’s possessions and, more importantly, why do they sport identical tattoos?

We’re going to find him.

When Tate doesn’t answer his phone or arrive home after the accident, Celine fears the worst. Still holding on to hope her husband may be alive, Celine is desperate to track Tate down and figure out what’s going on before it’s too late. The only problem? There are dark truths waiting to come out that are so atrocious she won’t ever be able to look away from them.

As she begins to put together the pieces of the mysterious day her husband went missing, it paints a picture of a man she never really knew. Is it possible Tate is still alive, or is she wasting her time searching for someone who will never be found? And if he is alive, how will they ever survive all that she’s unearthed?

With time running out, Celine must push the limits of the law and her safety to shed light on the secrets that have been hiding in the dark corners of their life together. In doing so, she may just uncover the final missing piece to the puzzle surrounding her husband’s fate.

Someone is lying.

Someone is missing.

Someone is guilty.

In this menacing, dark, and completely twisted domestic thriller, million-copy bestselling author Kiersten Modglin deep dives into a marriage riddled with lies, a couple with wicked secrets, and a woman who will stop at nothing to discover the truth about her husband’s disappearance. Forget everything you think you know…

I like a Kiersten Modglin story when I am looking for an addictively readable, over the top mystery. After reading a couple of her previous books, this one sounded too good to miss out on, and I had to download the audiobook version. Her audiobooks have been done really well so far, and this book is no different.

When I first started reading books, I did it for fun. Still do. But I’ve learned a few things since then, like how reading books has the positive side effect of making readers more empathetic. So when I started this book and heard the narrator voicing Celine, her experiences, and her thoughts, I found it relatively easy to put myself in Celine’s shoes, at least for the early parts of the story. Just imagine what it would be like to receive a call that your spouse had been killed in a car accident, go to the morgue to identify the body, only to discover that it isn’t your spouse at all. Instead, it is a guy who vaguely resembles him, and could be easily mistaken for him with the injuries from the accident. Talk about an emotional rollercoaster, and that is just how the story starts.

Celine is a character I wasn’t sure that I was going to love at first, but she grew on me over the course of the story. She’s tenacious and brave, afraid of what she is going to find out, but determined to discover the truth at the bottom of all of this. Those qualities really grew on me, and made me like her more as the story went on. I did feel like she kind of got lost in the story as the mystery was being uncovered, but aside from that, she was a character that pursued answers in spite of her fear of what will be uncovered and how it will impact her marriage, if her husband is even still alive.

The story is told in two different timelines—one is present day and the other is a series of flashbacks of Tate’s life, and they paint portraits of two very different men, yet they’re both Tate. Readers, and Celine are both left wondering which one is the real Tate, especially as she discovers more about the man that she married. There are two male and two female narrators, but I struggled to differentiate between the separate male and female voices, and thought there were only two narrators for an embarrassingly long time, considering it says it right on the book page. 😬🤷🏻‍♀️

Like her other books that I’ve read, the plot moves into over-the-top territory at the end. However, I knew that going into this, so I was prepared to suspend disbelief for the story, and just went along for the ride. And what a ride it is, indeed. Modglin has a way of writing that keeps me hooked on her books, and unable to stop reading until I’ve finished the story. In this book, she’s written a fast-paced, surprising, and unpredictable mystery with dark themes that were completely unexpected. Overall, this was a fantastic read if you’re looking for something to keep you completely hooked, love twisty and dark mysteries, enjoy stories told through flashbacks, and with multiple POV characters in both time periods.

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