Loved this book from beginning to end. Never wanted it to end. Great characters especially Clare. Lots of excitement, mystery some humor ( as that’s Anne) and had me guessing till last page. Highly recommend!!!!

While maybe not an original plot line, Anne Laughlin built the Clare Lehane character as a real person would see her. She is intelligent, smart enough to know she has a problem but still deluding herself into believing she can control her addiction instead of it controlling her. This is a core problem shared by most addicts. As a competitive, over achiever, Clare's dependence has now led her from the fast track future she had worked so hard for to a small town law firm where she just wants to heal and figure out where she will go from here. But Clare didn't leave her problems when she left Chicago and she now finds herself between several unsavory characters that leave her no way out without sacrificing her future and maybe her life.
This is a good, solid thriller with a lot of life lesson thrown in that will leave readers wondering where Clare will land in the future. Lots of action to keep the pages turning and a couple of surprises when Clare's life is circling the drain. Anne Laughlin has now joined my authors TBR pile.

Am I or am I not a drug addict? I knew going in this was going to be a tough read. I decided to go for it. Detective Freya Saucedo, member of the local drug task force and attracted to Clare. Clare Lehane, drug addict, attorney, constantly looking for her next score, and attracted to Freya. While reading, I thought about drug addiction and the tough challenge of letting go. It is hard for me to believe that anyone would answer the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and their response would be, "a drug addict". Similar to other reviews, it was easy to like Freya and a challenge to like Clare.

Small town drug dealing was central to the story and law enforcement attempt to eliminate it. With Clare at the center, as she put herself between a rock and a hard place. Since so much of this read we are in the head of Clare, it really hits hard how she became addicted and her struggle to maintain her professional work while continuing her habit. From that stand point, the story was well-written. As the story unfolds, I cringed and hoped for Clare. I did appreciate some of the supporting characters, her new boss Elizabeth, Donna (office manager), and Ben (Freya's partner). Though unsettling, it was good for me to move outside my comfort zone and be reminded that there are people just like Clare.

NetGalley Review:

Wow, what an unexpected tension fest! I enjoyed this book immensely. I will however warn, this not for the faint of heart. This is a painful and sometimes too real exploration of addiction and mental health. I recommend this for anyone looking to be left a bit unresolved.

Goodness me this is a strange book... I wanted to shout at Clare, I wanted to shake her, I wanted to sit her down and give her a good talking to but also I was turning the pages. This is a book full of angst and bad decision making but I could totally see how an intelligent woman could follow the path Clare did by just not doing the right thing when she should. It shows how sometimes life isn’t about making bad decisions so much as not making the right ones at the right time.

Clare moves to a small town and vows to beat her addiction to pills which she started to get through law school and the tough corporate world but she refuses to believe she’s an addict. Her new job in a small town means everyone is connected and everyone knows everyone else. When Clare falls for a detective who is investigating the change in local Drug trafficking, her life gets even more complicated. Clare needs to tell Freya the truth but she can't as the implications are enormous to her job, her life, her freedom and her friends.

This is very well plotted and develops at a good pace. I enjoyed it even as I wanted to get a hold of Clare and shake her. Ms Laughlin made me care for an unsympathetic woman and that’s rare.

I was given a copy of this book by Netgalley in return for an honest review

Like most addicts Clare Lehane thought she had it all under control. What started out as an aid to help her with college exams wasn’t that bad, lots of other students used adderall when going through finals. The problem was that even though she passed everything with top grades when she left university and could have chosen a job with any one of the law firms in Chicago but she instead decided to accept the offer made by one of the top firms. Thinking she could rise to the top there wasn’t as easy as she’d thought it would be. So when things got hard she relied on a few adderall and speed to help her get the job done in time. But as many addicts she didn’t seem to realise the drugs were making everything worse. Finally she reached the end, she couldn’t take it anymore. It was time to make a move. So that is how Clare went from a top law firm in Chicago to a much smaller law firm in the small town of Money Creek.
She tries to go cold turkey but she just couldn’t handle the physical pain so she now had to find a new contact she hoped would be able to keep her supplied. Big problems start when she meets her new supplier who just happens to be the son of her new bosses. On top of that she finds herself in a relationship with one of the people in charge of finding the suppliers. Now her supply is running low and it hasn’t helped her in any way when her suppliers get killed during a meeting of the top bosses. Good thing, Clare had to use the bathroom. Only thing that saved her. Everything starts to fall apart.
Ms Laughlin has given us a great read but it did start out kind of slow. I kept with it and when I got into a few chapters I was hooked. Couldn’t put the book down. Simply a great read.
ARC via NetGalley/ Bold Stroke Books

All right, I had to digest this one a bit before being able to write a review of it. Although the story is a somewhat interesting crime story, which is something I like, my attention just got pulled away time and again.

Clare is a drug addict, she doesn't see herself that way, but she is one. She uses pills on a daily basis. After another bender, she loses her job at a Chicago law firm. She decides city life isn't for her any longer and packs up her things to start fresh in Money Creek, a town in rural Illinois. She tried for a day to go without her pills but she can't. When she goes to the local university to find a new dealer she gets involved in something even more dangerous than the drugs she is taking.

The book opens with the most interesting event in the book, only to go back in time for the story that leads up to it. With the event in the opener, I was expecting the story to go their quicker than it actually did, I felt like I was just waiting for this event. There is so much of the same going on, Clare doing drugs, obsessing over different things, her new love interest, over and over. When the event finally does come back around my attention was no longer on this book or the resolution of this story. I just wanted this to wrap it up already. This book could have been much more of a crime story than it is now, it's just a story about a druggie and it isn't entertaining in the least.

This book is like passing a horrible accident and not being able to look away. Every move that Clare made was crazy and you could see her going down the rabbit hole with every step. This book kept me intrigued and I just had to know what was going to happen next. A great page turner.

3.5 Stars. This was quite the story and honestly I’m a little unsure how much I liked this. I think I have to go with a little over 3 stars since 3 stars is an average rating for me and I think this deserves a little more than that for the chance Laughlin took. I like when authors take a chance especially when they know it could affect sales. To me it means the author has a story they feel really strongly about telling and I like that.

The reason I mention Laughlin taking a chance is because her main character is a drug addict. I love Ashley Bartlett’s Cash Braddock series which stars a drug dealer (it is so clever), and I thought Jessi Thoma’s new book Serenity, about a recovering drug addict, was really well done. Because I enjoyed these examples, I thought maybe I can handle a book about a drug addict. The answer is not as much. There is clearly a difference between a sober drug dealer and sober addict to an addict who currently uses. To be as frank as I can, this book drove my anxiety a bit nuts. This main character, with all her bad decisions, over and over is not easy to read about. I did not like her for most of the book. Laughlin does work hard to make her sympathetic and I think she started to win me over near the end, but overall she exhausted me.

I am going to put the romance tag on this but I don’t feel good about it. The character who is the addict, Clare, uses drugs and alcohol almost 24/7. I have to wonder would the other character of Freya (I like that name) even be attracted to the personality of a sober Clare. Clare talks about how she is not the same person on drugs, especially when she mixes with alcohol, so is it a romance if a person is attracted to someone who is not their real self but an altered version? It’s a question I can’t help but wonder about. Besides that issue, the romance also moved too quickly for me. It’s not insta love but it is fast and with so much else going on in the book I don’t think the romance had time to really develop.

There was some excitement which I enjoyed. The book starts off with a bang and immediately grabs you which is always a nice touch. There also is a baby mystery. I found the mystery to be really easy to guess, but it still kept my attention. But what I really found to be the most enjoyable part was any of the law parts. Clare is a semi functioning attorney and the case she was working on was really interesting. Laughlin clearly knows the law and those parts were well done. I just wish we got to see even more of the big case.

The ending is interesting and I think people will have some opinions on it. I wasn’t crazy about it while I was reading, but the more I sat and thought of it, the more I respected it and was happy that Laughlin wrote it that way. For me it leaves things open for a sequel that has a lot of potential.

If you want to take a chance on something very different from the lesfic norm, this book is for you. It was a bit much for me personally, but I’m glad to see a book out there like this. Making me, as a reader, uncomfortable in this situation is okay and probably one of Laughlin’s goals anyway. So I have to give her props for sticking her neck out and writing a book that is not cookie cutter with recycled ideas. If she writes a book 2, I will read it.

It seems odd to say I enjoyed a book that is full of unhappy, tense topics and situations but I found myself drawn in and unable to put the book down, despite my continuing apprehension about how things would turn out. Clare is a lawyer in a big city firm struggling with a drug addiction, who decides to take up a job in the small town of Money Creek.

I haven't read Laughlin before so I can't comment as to whether this fits into the usual tone of her books, but I'll be picking up some more to find out, as whilst the topic of drugs and addiction is at times difficult to read about, I enjoyed the narrative. There are many different characters, but I was impressed that they weren't difficult to keep track of and I appreciated the descriptions of small town life and how everyone hears about everything. Laughlin writes in a style I really like and I welcomed her writing on addiction, Clare's feelings, motives and decisions and how the trade operates.

The book is written from many different points of view, which was done well enough that it didn't become confusing. I found it slightly odd at times that one of the points of view was from a male, but I got used to it. There is some romance in the book, but the thriller aspect is the larger part. I enjoyed Clare and Freya getting to know each other and would be interested in hearing more about them in a future book. I really appreciated the ending - I don't want to give anything away - but it felt like an appropriate, real life ending.

I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys a well written thriller with some romance on the outskirts of the story.

I received an e-ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Clare is a young lawyer who has been on top of everything in her life until she went to law school. She became addicted to pills to stay on top and she thought she only needed them to finish law school but she grew dependent on them. When she loses her job she decides to move to rural Illinois to work at small law firm and to turn her life around.

Freya is a detective who assigned drug task force in Money Creek which have been seeing a lot of increase with drug trafficking. When Freya and Clare meets at a social gathering the attraction is mutual. Clare who wanted to turn her life around falls into old habits and get involved with drug dealers who later turns out to be her boss son. As Clare is way over her head in a no win situation you want to root for her to overcome her demons.

The romance part of the story I think could’ve been more developed it was like Freya had half blinders on because she so focus on Clare drinking that she didn’t notice of other addiction and then you had Clare who wants to overcome everything was in denial most of the times you didn’t want to root for her but then she had moments when you do.

Overall a good read.

I received an ARC copy of this book from the Publisher via Netgalley and voluntarily leaving my review.

I had high hopes for this book, and I'm sorry to say the story didn't meet them. My apologies to Ms. Laughlin.

I did not connect to Clare. I couldn't relate to her lack of responsibility in her job, her drug problem or the massive case of denial she had. Honestly, Clare struck me as a pretty crappy lawyer. I did not understand the attraction Freya had for Clare. I get not being into a person, as Freya was with Jo, but the whole Freya & Clare connection lacked spark and sizzle. It struck me as contrived and convenient. So much of the story floated on the surface of things that I found it difficult to lose myself in the tale. There was no immersion for me. The drug dealers seemed to be stereotypical, with only one exception, and he was a "bit" player. I wanted a better examination of Clare's drug problem, beyond the simple chemical addiction. I wanted to see what attracted Freya to Clare so much that she wanted Clare to be innocent, and was disappointed when we didn't see that.

There was a bit of action in the middle, and the book was structured in such a way that I was curious about the big moment in the book. (I can read the end of a story, but still want to know how things got to that point). So my curiosity kept me reading. But the end was, for me, a let-down.
I feel bad saying these things, because I know how much work goes into a novel. And I recognize that some readers feel this is the author's best work. But I want more from the books I read. I want to connect with at least one character, I want to understand their motivations and feel...something.
I did not have that experience with this book.

Clare, 25, was a very intelligent person. She was near the top of her class in high school and college. But when she entered the very competitive law school environment, she found her classmates just as intelligent and competitive. She felt she needed an edge to stay near the top so she turned to drugs figuring once law school was finished so would her need for drugs. But that never happened. Her dependency grew. There was always one excuse after another for her to use speed, Valium, OxyContin, or Adderall. Later, when those weren’t readily available she turned to meth. She became desperate for drugs, and desperate people do desperate things.

Fredya Saucedo was a detective with the Illinois State Police assigned to the new drug task force in Money Creek, where the drug traffic had sharply increased. When she met Clare at a social gathering at Clare’s new employer’s house, she was attracted to her confidence and intelligence. The feeling was mutual. But Clare was weary about getting involved with a person who undoubtedly could spot a person with a drug habit. However, Fredya was too concerned with Clare’s excessive drinking habits to notice anything else. Besides her drug addiction, Clare drank so much she would have blackouts, often waking to find a strange man/woman in her bed. Clare’s life was a mess, and it became even more so when she became involved with her boss’ drug dealer son and his associates.

Initially, I didn’t like Clare, but as the story progressed she became a person you rooted for to get the help she so desperately needed. She was in a no win situation. She was being blackmailed, but didn’t want to ruffle any feathers because she craved the drugs only her blackmailers could provide. She didn’t want to confide in Freya because she didn’t want that relationship to end or let Fredya see the real Clare…the drug addicted alcoholic one.

I think the romance aspect of the book could have been more developed. It seemed they hardly knew each other and were already thinking they were falling in love.The legal aspect of it was interesting, but the book ended before the case went to trial which was actually understandable.

I do think the author did a good job in showing how drug dependency can grow from using them to get a little extra boost during the college years to desperately needing them to function in everyday life such as social gatherings or stress related work situations. True to life, people think they can handle their drugs, until they can’t.

The characters in the story were flawed in many different ways. There was no easy way out or quick solutions. The author held on to the realistic nature of the addiction and did not try to provide a quick fix. She wrote about a serious topic and gave it the attention it deserved. It was well written.

An ARC was given for an honest review.

I’ve long been a fan of the books of Anne Laughlin, and Money Creek is her best yet. If you’re looking for a page-turner with a flawed (but complex and sympathetic) protagonist struggling to make her way, this is a terrific read.

I appreciate the honest portrayal of Clare, a lawyer battling inner demons while lugging a Costco-sized case of denial. As Clare digs herself in deeper and deeper – both in perilous situations and her personal choices – the choke hold tightens around her. I was anxious to see what happened to those around Clare – and to Clare herself – as I always do with Laughlin’s protagonists.

As a City Mouse, I love how the author shares with me what life might be like in a small town. I echo Clare’s concerns: “Will it at least have a coffee shop? A bookstore?...”

It is also a privilege to step inside a courtroom with the author guiding me (“she could easily see Abraham Lincoln trying cases here”) and into law offices and police procedurals. Anne knows her stuff, and her specificity allows me to feel like I was right there in the action.

Her dialogue epitomizes what Leonardo da Vinci’s is reputed to have said: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Laughlin scrupulously avoids authorly tricks and tics in favor of letting her characters speak for themselves. She is both a reader’s writer and a writer’s writer!

Lastly, Money Creek’s love scenes are discreet - but with heat. As Clare says at one point, “caution had no chance against desire.” Oh-oh!

I’m already ready for Anne Laughlin to publish her next book so I can learn “What next?”

This was not a light read, but that was advertised from the get-go. The writing was fantastic, describing Clare's turmoil effectively without too much narration. I didn't feel bored at any point, not even in the chapters before the pace picks up.
Clare felt like a realistic character, and despite her evident weakness, she was easy to root for. I appreciated that she had so much depth, and wasn't a one-dimensional junkie. The romance with Freya was okay, but I felt that she was more of a plot device than a fully fleshed character. She didn't seem to have the same complexity as Clare did. I was fine with this, because she worked well as a plot device, and was exactly the kind of person that Clare needed. Evan and Henry were similarly unlikeable, and although I don't fully understand what Henry's deal with Clare was, I have no desire to know more.
The ending was good. I was worried about the resolution as I counted down the pages to the end, but it went smoothly and didn't feel rushed. I liked how it wasn't overly optimistic, because complete forgiveness is not realistic, or even something that Clare deserves at this point. Still, she isn't a bad person, and the ending she gets is reflective of that. There's room for her future to go either way, but her story did not feel unfinished.
A major dislike for me was how much the description and prologue jumped forwards in time. Okay, the murder may be an interesting plot point, but it also doesn't happen until the two thirds mark. This means that without having opened the book, readers are going in with way too much of the plot. I didn't see a point to the prologue, other than to engage readers. As I mentioned, I was content with the beginning chapters, so this felt unneccessary and killed some of the suspense. I was a little pre-occupied with this as I read up to the actual scene, which detracted from my overall experience.
I just realized while writing this review that the outcome of the legal case is never shown. Which is an unfortunate loose end in an overall complete story. It was not the most important subplot of the story, and I understand why it would have been difficult to mention in the last few pages, but the fact that it was unfinished rankles me.
Other than that, Money Creek was a gripping read, and I will definitely be looking for more from Anne Laughlin. Four and a half stars.