the inmate

Okaaaay... she did it again.

This is only the second Freida McFadden book I've read, but once again, she completely fooled me. One of the things I really enjoy about her books is that I genuinely can't figure out what is going to happen. Every time I think I've solved the mystery, she manages to prove me wrong.

The Inmate follows Brooke, a young woman who returns to her hometown and starts working as a nurse at a maximum security prison. What makes things even more complicated is that one of the inmates is Shane Nelson, someone Brooke has a complicated history with.

As Brooke starts working at the prison, the past she thought she had left behind slowly begins to come back into her life. The story explores themes like trust, guilt, manipulation, love, secrets, and how much we can really know about the people around us.

I really liked the combination of the prison setting and the mystery surrounding Brooke's past. It created a constant feeling that there was something I wasn't being told, which made me want to keep reading and figure out what was really going on.

The story also gets started almost immediately. Thank God for an author who doesn't spend half the book on unnecessary build up before anything actually happens. I was hooked from the beginning and found myself wanting to know what was going to happen next.

I honestly thought I had everything figured out.

I was wrong.

The first plot twist completely caught me off guard. Just when I thought I had recovered from that one, another twist came along that I never saw coming. And then another one. And somehow, there was still another twist waiting for me at the very end.

At some point, I stopped trying to predict what was going to happen because clearly, I wasn't going to win that battle.

What I enjoyed most was how all the twists kept changing the way I looked at the story. Little details that didn't seem particularly important at first suddenly felt completely different once I knew more. I love when a thriller can make me look back at earlier parts of the story and realize that I had missed things that were right in front of me.

I also enjoyed the relationship between Brooke and Shane. Their history adds another layer to the story, and I found myself thinking about how much our feelings for someone can influence the choices we make.

There were a few lines about their relationship that especially stood out to me:

“I’ve never met a guy who has made me want to break all my rules before.”

“I’ll never feel about anyone else the way I feel about you.”

“Shane is something to me that nobody else can be.”

Overall, I had such a great time reading The Inmate. It was an easy, fast paced read that got me into a reading flow almost immediately, and the constant twists kept me interested until the very end.

If you enjoy psychological thrillers, prison settings, complicated relationships, secrets, and stories that keep making you question who you can trust, I would definitely recommend this one.