A Stranger on the Beach by Michele Campbell
A snooty woman named Caroline has moved into her brand new million dollar beach house and spies a hunky beach bum staring at it with longing in his beautiful eyes. She assumes he’s out to rob her. So what does she do? Call the coppers, maybe? Nope. She sleeps with him! And things go terribly awry from there because she is married but it’s sort of, kinda okay because hubs is cheating too.
What is wrong with me that I am drawn to these kinds of books? Please don’t answer that.
Anyhow this book delivers if you’re looking for an unbelievable tale about wealthy jerks with lots of secrets doing terrible things to everyone around them because they can. For me it veered too far into ridiculousness and I truly despised Caroline who was conceited and spoiled and just 100% ugh. I don’t care how beautiful she was supposed to be, I found it very difficult to believe the beach bum (Aiden) who was closer to her daughters age would fall so fast and hard for her when she wasn’t even nice to him. He was weird. I know I was supposed to dislike Caroline so that’s actually a strength of the book because man did I despise her but I also figured out what was going on long before the big reveal and I’m not really good at these guessing games and that is the fault of the book. I will give it points for making me guess for a bit with all of its unreliable narrators and for keeping me hooked until the end because I had to know if I was wrong.
I’ll give it three stars for its fearlessness in using coincidence to get from point A to point B and for using its unbelievable plot twists to its best advantage and also for creating such ridiculous people. I probably wouldn’t read it again but I’m not sorry I stuck it out until the end.
