Thank you to Netgalley and Hodder & Stoughton for the advance review copy of Anna Downes' debut movel.

The cover of The Safe Place got my attention straight away - an idyllic poolside scene but with a mysterious undertone - No Phones, No Outsiders, No escape. It sounds like just the kind of thriller I love and I was really looking forward to reading it. I wasn't disappointed.

Emily Proudman's life has hit an all time low. A wannabe actor currently temping as a receptionist, she flunks yet another acting audition and arrives late to her day job. She's given the sack, gets dropped by her agent and is about to be kicked out of her dingy flat due to being behind with her rent. She can't contact her adoptive parents again and ask for money - their relationship has been strained for a while and she only ever seems to contact them when she needs something.

After a 'chance encounter' with her boss, he tells her that sacking her was a mistake, and offers her the opportunity of a lifetime - to more to a beautiful private estate in France and help his wife Nina take care of their daughter and their home. It sounds idyllic, but there's rumour in the office that Scott hates his wife. Their 6 year old also has health conditions; but Scott was pretty vague. Despite the ambiguity of the situation Emily feels she has nothing to lose. With no real friends or family members to stay at home for and her life falling into tatters around her, it seems like just the chance she needs to turn her life around.

When she arrives at the estate in France; on the surface it looks amazing. Remote and calm but lots of work to be done; Emily can really picture herself there. But when she meets Nina she wonders whether she's made a mistake. Quiet and tense, Nina is hard to read, incredibly uptight and bans her from entering the main house. Aurelia is a mute 6 year old girl with an allergy to the sun, She screams, lashes out and refuses to be touched.

Convincing herself to give this oppotunity a chance, they slowly get to know each other and Emily starts to settle into her new surroundings. The more she learns about her new employers however, she very quickly l;earns that there are dangerous secrets hidden behind the glamourous facade of this life, this house and their relationship.

The Safe Place builds slowly but keeps you hooked throughout and is packed full of suspense. I felt willed to keep on reading, with the chapters swapping between the perspectives of Emily and her boss Scott, as well as flashbacks of Nina's experiences, slowly piecing together the history of the situation and how the events began to unfold. The character building is really strong, and I could really picture Nina and their daughter Aurelia in particular; both of whom were quite eerie and haunting in parts.

I read this book in 24 hours and LOVED the ending, feeling it concluded in the 'right way'.I was however still left with some questions, thinking that Emily's backstory would have been more prevalent than it was.

I have two main criticisms of this book and the only reason why for me it doesn't get 5 stars.

Firstly, I find it far fetched to believe that any young woman would have no pull to social media, email, wifi or a mobile phone, and that whatever your background, you'd be prepared to fly to another country without the ability to stay connected with anyone.

Secondly. and this is hard to discuss without spoilers so I will be fairly vague, I found the similarity to a real life events a little unnecessary. I would say for UK readers at least, it is virtually impossible to read a key part of the book without linking this to real life events and this cheapened the creativity of the storyline for me. My comments will make sense when you read it!

Despite these two minor points, The Safe Place was a great read, and a debut novel to be proud of.

Lucy

Emily is a struggling actress who is temping to make ends meet. However she's not very good at that either and is sacked. Not wanting to ask her family to bail her out yet again, she is relieved when Scott the CEO of the company she'd been fired from offers her a job in France helping his wife Nina and looking after their daughter Aurelia. Any sane person might wonder why she'd be chosen for this role especially when she discovers that the house, though beautiful, is also very secluded and cut off from the outside world, no internet, mobile phone coverage etc. Aurelia's behaviour is also very strange and Yves the handy man doesn't seem particularly friendly. I think at this point I would have been hightailing it back to London but Emily is made of sterner stuff. As the story progresses we find out why Nina and Aurelia are living in seclusion and it becomes apparent that Nina and Scott have a very dark secret.

This was an intriguing book. A dark psychological thriller with an unusual storyline. I found it difficult sometimes to get to grips with the characters which affected the flow for me but still enjoyable to read with some beautiful descriptions of the French scenery.

My thanks to NetGalley and Hodder & Stoughton for the opportunity to read and review honestly.

This story is told from the perspectives of Emily (a hot mess) and Scott (the sexy, mega-rich CEO), with occasional historical musings from Scott’s wife (the gorgeous, neurotic mess).

After Emily’s life falls apart, Scott steps in, the knight in shining armour and offers her a lifeline. Too good to be true? Of course, where would the story be if everyone lived happily ever after? Once Emily heads to the secluded house in France, she starts to realise there’s more going on behind the scenes than she first imagined – it’s a bit weird.

To be honest though, the first 70% of this book is boring and mundane. Not a lot happens, and even the stuff that’s meant to be weird, just isn’t. I know this is fiction, and therefore a degree of suspended belief is required, but I just don’t get why someone would be super concerned that they’re not allowed free-reign in someone else’s house. Personally, if it was me, I’d be “OK, that seems fair,” and move on. This is also probably why I could have drug dealers living next door to me, and a serial killer across the street, but I digress.

The last bit, where the action happens, does at least tie everything together and moves at a much quicker pace. However, the plot was predictable and had no edge-of-the-seat moments. Equally, whilst there was a clear solution to the greater arc, there were a lot of questions left unanswered, which is really disappointing after we’ve been asked to follow the stories of four characters.

Finally, I found the characters to be really lazy clichés – the young girl who hasn’t got her life together, the all-powerful, in control CEO who saves the day (or does he?) and the rich, bored, paranoid housewife hiding out in France. It was all a little samey-samey for me, and really didn’t allow for any bonding with them.

The Stars
I’ve struggled trying to decide what to give this, and in the end I have to go with a 3.
It was an alright read, but nothing particularly special. A good distraction from the insanity of the world right now, as long as you don’t want something particularly gritty to get your teeth in to. Definitely perfect for fans of Lianne Moriarty.

Although I enjoyed the premise of this book, I found the characters to be more predictable to what I would have liked, and I knew there was just something nagging me about Scott from the very start.

I didn't get to grips with Emily, I felt like in an Ideal world could anyone really be that stupid to move to an isolated place with an unknown couple, no internet & no way of getting help if needed.

I do feel like I am giving A Safe Place a hard time, don't get me wrong it is a good, easy summer read with a good plot. It just wasn't for me, and left more questions than answers.

This was a strange one for me as even though I couldn't put it down I'd already guessed what was going on from very early on.

I can't honestly say whyher I liked or disliked it. Yes I NEEDED to keep reading it, it had a hold of me BUT it was overly predictable and I think I just wanted more...

I enjoyed the writing style, it did keep me hanging but the ending just didnt work for me.

To me the ending left too many unanswered questions, personally I felt it wasn't tied up as neatly as what I'd have liked.

3*

Thanks to netgalley and Hodder & Stoughton for the ARC.

Emily can't seem to hold down any job for very long. Yet, she is determined not to ask her parents for money again, therefore, when her latest boss ask her to become an Au pair/ housekeeper, she jumps at the chance! She is flying on a private plane to a hidden estate in the South of France, she must be dreaming, it is idlyic, beyond beautiful. However, as good as she thinks she is with children, her boss's wife and their child are slow to warm to Emily. The child has something medically wrong with her, Emily tries to understand, but once she figures everything out, will she survive the truth? Absolute good read, great new author!
I highly recommend! Thank you Netgalley!
carolintallahassee.com

A good gripping read. I gave this 3 stars as I did not particularly like any of the characters.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

Thank you to Netgalley and Hodder & Stoughton for the eARC of this book. It’s been a while since I have read a thriller and after I’d read the synopsis and taken one look at the cover photograph, I was completely intrigued. I’m so glad I read this book, it was so enjoyable and I was hooked all the way through to the very last page. I devoured it in only a few days.

The setting is gorgeous; a beautiful house in France, situated in large grounds and with an infinity pool overlooking the sea. The author has a lovely writing style and a talent for describing in detail the amazing scenery, wonderful descriptions of Querencia and trips to the local food market. I was completely enveloped in this beautiful home and its surroundings. It’s sheer escapism and I could just imagine soaking up the sun, poolside, with a chilled glass of wine and tantalising wafts of food coming from the poolside kitchen. The descriptions of food were truly mouth watering and I wanted to hop on the nearest plane to France and buy cheese and wine.
I really liked the format of this book. It’s essentially from Emily and Scott’s alternative narrative with some snippets of the prior history filled in from Nina. The characters are all intriguing and interesting and their personality quirks and faults are portrayed really well.

The author creates a great sense of the atmosphere from calm, peaceful sunny days to more suspenseful and dark moments. The pacing is perfect, it builds slowly, with lots of unpredictable twists and turns, to a suspenseful and satisfactory conclusion. I pondered all the way through how on earth this was going to all end it was all wrapped up adequately.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and I didn’t want it to end. A gripping and engrossing read and the perfect summer suspense novel. This is an amazing debut novel from a promising new author, who I definitely want to read more of.

The Safe Place

The premise of this book is interesting. Though I do think the taglines on the cover did this book a disservice...as despite having read the blurb & being intrigued...when looking at the cover you think that you are getting a different book. Like a retreat of sorts where phones are banned.

There are very few characters in this book & unfortunately I detested the main 3 - Emily, Nina & Scott. Nina & Scott are so overpriveliged & not living in the real word. Scott's experience on Ryanair was especially telling & disturbing. I never felt anything but dislike for Nina even when she was gentle...she just came across as the ultimate phoney.
Emily - wow what a madam...ungrateful, spoilt, disloyal....couldn't stand her.

Not liking Emily to such an extent did affect my enjoyment of the book as a whole because it's her eyes we are experiencing everything through. It wasn't that she was an unreliable narrator...it was just she was a selfish self indulgent child & therefore her opinion on anything meant very little to me.

There was too much scene setting.. whilst sometimes this can help the places comes alive..
In this I felt I knew too much about the location...about the house...about Scott's job etc.

Where the flashbacks stopped...I was disappointed as I really wanted the next few scenes...they stopped almost at the point they got interesting.

I really enjoyed the last 3rd of the book....once the narrative increased pace &, we felt like we were finding out what was happening.

The twist was a surprise & was interesting. Emily's reactions & decisions after were exasperating.

The premise is so interesting...I wish we had known more about the decisions that happened between that point & this one & think that would have helped me enjoy the book all the more.

Thanks to the author, publisher & Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The Safe House is one of those books that you start reading without really knowing where the story is going - why is Emily willing to give up her London life on a whim of the man who (more or less) fired her? Why is Nina so cray-cray? Why is Scott averse to spending ANY TIME with his family? Why was the family so secretive about everything? I genuinely had no idea what was going on and the suspense actually had me hooked. Especially comparing it to the last book I read which was painfully vague without any of the suspense. The Safe House was a breath of fresh air. I barely put it down the entire day I read it, only stopping for food breaks and even then, they were the quickest possible food breaks so I could understand this story and make sense of it all.

The reason I love reading so much is because sometimes, very rarely, you come across a book that speaks to your soul. That you fly through and get excited by, and for me, The Safe House was one of those special books. It was exciting and it made my heart pound, everything that Emily was feeling was mirrored in my own thoughts and reactions. As the novel reached it's climax, I was reading as fast as my eyes could cope with because I NEEDED answers as much as Emily did and I was just as gut-punched, just as shocked as Emily was. I felt like I was living the entirety of the novel beside her, as if I was right there in France with her. 

A lot of the tension in The Safe Place is pretty much due to the secretive nature of the Denny family. Scott runs a business in London and never seems to spend any time with his family and early on, we see a tense conversation between him and his wife, Nina, which leads us to believe their picture-perfect life is anything but. So he hires Emily to go over and be a live-in au pair/gardener/dogsbody/assistant and Emily jumps at the chance, having recently lost her job at Scott's company, and being in a constant fight with her family and being evicted from her flat, it's almost like salvation of some kind, Scott is a knight in shining armour. But then when Emily gets to France, Nina is nothing like Emily expects; she's kind and funny and warm, but she has flashes of temper and Emily isn't allowed in the "big" house, instead being put in to the guest house and there's no phone service or wifi, which Emily initially sees as being a way to detox from her old life, but soon becomes stifling. And then there's Aurelia. Mute, prone to big kick offs, and seemingly very ill. 

It was such an intoxicating environment, throw in the gorgeous French weather and Emily's mutual attraction to Scott, and there was bound to be fireworks. I think this book resonated with me so much, because I kind of understood where Scott was coming from, the way he thought that Emily had fallen into his lap because she was perfect for his family. Like I believe in that, that people come along at specific points in our lives (not all good, necessarily) for a reason. And the spark between Emily and Scott leapt off the pages. I knew it was wrong, and Emily knew it was wrong, but there was this unfeasible link between them, throughout the whole novel. I've never been more desperate for two people to kiss each other, despite all the other stuff going on around them. I was unashamedly rooting for them.

I honestly cannot gush about this novel enough - the pacing was absolutely spot-on, the writing was on-point, the characters were believable and realistic and, surprisingly, empathetic. Even when the book reached its climax and everything was revealed, I still felt sad for certain characters, because sometimes you can be taken away on something so easily that you don't realise it's wrong until it's too late to do anything about it and once that thing is done, you can't un-do it. Whereas the novel itself references the art of Kintsugi (the Japanese art of repairing something broken with something gold, to make it more appealing/beautiful), you can't do that in real life. You can't fix something that's broken, you can't un-do this specific type of wrong-doing. 

I understood everyone's motives. Nina's. Scott's. Emily's. Every decision that was made was made in the heat of the moment, and sometimes you forget what's black or white or fifty shades of grey. Yes, there was wrong decisions and bad choices, but they were all perfectly understandable in the heat of the moment. That's what made this novel so fascinating, it's almost as if it was a look at all of the bad choices the characters made and we get to decide how we would react in the same situation. Once upon a time, I would have condemned all of the characters as awful human beings, every last one of them. But recently I've learned that you have to go through something first before you can properly understand someone's motivations. It doesn't excuse certain things, but for this novel, it gave me a more balanced perspective, so instead of being all rash and judging the characters, I let the story do its job. 

One of the trickier things to get correct in a thriller is the ending. So many authors take the easy route and just end the novel, with big, gaping cliff-hangers, whereas Anna Downes gives a pretty resolute ending to The Safe Place. I still have a few specific questions, but they're more of the psychological nature of what goes on in the novel than the physical nature of how things ended. I was worried that with such a massive build-up, with the immense anticipation and excitement, that the ending would be disappointing (I've been burned more than a few times), but Anna Downes stuck the ending. There was not one page in this book that wasn't utterly amazing. The characters were so beautifully drawn and the writing was absolutely perfect. I have not been this excited about a book for so, so long, but this is easily one of the best books I've ever read. It's right up there in my top 5. The Safe Place absolutely knocked my socks off and it's very deserving of a place on your bookshelf or Kindle.

I would never have thought that this was Anna Downes first book. She writes in such an accomplished way and the story held my interest throughout. The story is of current media interest as well which should prove a further incentive to read.
The setting of the story and the characters were good, quite believeable and the whole story had a realistic quality to it. I will certainly hope that she can follow up with further fiction such as this.
Well done.

Thank you to NetGalley and Hodder & Stoughton for the Arc of The Safe Place by Anne Downes❤️

Also thank you to Anne Downes for writing this fast paced thrilling book❤️

Follows Emily who's life is a whole mess...she lost her acting agent and her job in just 1 day!😱 But Scott Denny is a CEO- he offers Emily a job as a nanny/housekeeper on his french estate... Twist she realises that Scott and his wife are hiding some dangerous secrets... But what are they.. but the thing is if she don't play along to this then it could become a prison where none of them can escape the place...

This was an interesting, fast paced, gripping, thrilling rollercoaster of a book, with many twists and turns and suspenses.. I loved this book and I read it so quick I couldn't put it down!!❤️❤️❤️❤️

Well done Anne Downes ❤️

I definitely recommend this to anyone who is thinking of reading this🥰
5 stars out of 5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

This was very clever and kept me guessing right to the end as the tale wove in and out. Very enjoyable and I would recommend - thank you.

Emily goes to live with Nina and her daughter Aurelia in a house in France. They are not what they seem and Nina will do whatever she can to hide her guilty secret. A tense read based on a real life case. Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for letting me review this book.

Absolutely fantastic debut novel and highly recommend.
I enjoyed getting to know the characters and I found it was a book I could lose myself in and be gripped by.
It was dark, chilling and kept me guessing.

I really enjoyed the book. Loved the dual perspective of Emily and Scott, seeing them through each others eyes as well as their own gave real insight into how somebody can perceived compared to who they actually are. Mystery on every single page, and twists you can't predict. A great summer thriller.

Some of you will agree, some will be appalled but I find the disappearance of Madeleine McCann 100% the fault of her parents. What decent parent would leave 3 small children alone while they went for dinner?
By now you are probably wondering why I'm prattling on about a small girl who disappeared 13 years ago. When you read this book you cannot fail to make the links to this case when you hear the description of the child. Up until this point I was enjoying the book and overall did find it an enjoyable read but the "ripping off" of the real life case just doesnt sit well with me. I know authors draw inspiration from a variety of sources but this was too true to life.
You may think differently, you may not even know who Madeleine McCann is, make up your own mind.

The Safe Place by Anna Downes....
I give this book 4.6 out of 5 stars ✨....
.
.
No phones. No outsiders. No escape.
Emily’s life is a mess until she is offered a great opportunity to be a housekeeper at a remote and beautiful French estate by her ex-boss Scott. Enchanted by his lovely wife Nina and his eccentric young daughter Aurelia, Emily falls headlong into the oasis of wine soaked days by the pool.

All is not as at seems however, when she realises Scott and Nina have some dangerous secrets and if she doesn’t play along, the consequences could be deadly ☠️
.
.
I’ve seen some mixed reviews about this book but I actually enjoyed it 😍. I think it would be the perfect beach read for a holiday and made me wish I was sunning myself by a pool somewhere 🏝. It had a great twist which I did not see coming and had a dark undertone similar to Ruth Ware books. The only thing I would say is I didn’t love the ending it felt a little rushed

Thank you to netgalley and Hodder & Stoughton for allowing me to read this ARC. 😊 So for me this was a really strange review to write, because I really enjoyed this book, it was well written and fast paced and I really did get into it, and normally I'd give it a higher rating, but with with this being 'the crime Thriller of summer' I felt like something was missing. The storyline was good, but slightly predictable at a certain point and it could've definitely involved more!

I really liked Emily's character, apart from when she forgot her mums birthday! 😳 But I really did like her, I felt so bad for her but at the same related to her because she was in such a magical moment she didn't see what was actually going on around her. I really didn't like Scott.. From the first time we meet him, just couldn't like him. Nina, was a hard one. Part of my liked her and felt sorry for her, the other part of me really disliked her.

It was a really good book and an easy read but IMO it wasn't the Thriller I'm used to, and I wish there would have been a few more twists. But I really loved Anna's writing and I will definitely be looking out for more of her books! 😍