Published: 3 November 2022

Author: B A Paris

Published by: Hodder & Stoughton

Genre: Thriller

Length: 368 pages

Reading dates: 4-7 November 2022

THEN

Amelie has always been a survivor, from losing her parents as a child in Paris to making it on her own in London. As she builds a career for herself in the magazine industry, she meets, and agrees to marry, Ned Hawthorne.

NOW

Amelie wakes up in a pitch-black room, not knowing where she is. Why has she been taken? Who are her mysterious captors? And why does she soon feel safer here, imprisoned, than she had begun to feel with her husband Ned?

I can’t believe this is my first book from B A Paris. When I was approached to read The Prisoner for the blog tour, I was thrilled to read my first (and it won’t be my last!)

The book begins with Amelie and her husband Ned being kidnapped in the middle of the night and taken to an isolated building where Amelie is kept in a dark basement and Ned is kept elsewhere, It is immediately apparent there is something very wrong in their relationship because Amelie is not concerned for Ned’s well being and in fact feels safer locked in a dark basement than living at home with him!

The book has a dual timeline, looking at before the events of the kidnapping while also describing how Amelie is feeling to be locked in the basement. Starting when Amelie is just 17 years old, her father has just died and she was moved to London, hoping to work to save enough money to study law. In a café one day when she has reached rock bottom, a kind stranger reaches out to her and offers her a job as a live in housekeeper. Caroline and Amelie become firm friends and she also meets Caroline’s friends, Lina and Justine. Justine works for a magazine and invites the girls to a party where Amelie meets the owner Ned, who on chatting to her offers her a job. After a whirlwind trip to Las Vegas for work, Ned comes up with a business arrangement – Amelie simply has to marry him to get his father off his back and after 30 days they can separate and he will pay her £100,000 for the cost of her studies.

The dual timelines worked well and as the story unfolds, we learn why Amelie is glad to be away from Ned. The pacing of the story is good – I was keen to find out Amelie’s back story but equally invested in hoping she would escape from the basement and be safe!

I was lucky enough to be invited to an event in London to meet some of Hodder’s top suspense authors and was thrilled to chat B A Paris (and to learn her real name) and to hear about her ideas and her writing processes.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Prisoner – I’ve felt a little like I’ve lost my reading mojo recently but I couldn’t put this down and it was so good to feel like that about a book again! A tense and thrilling read that really got my heart going, with unexpected twists, The Prisoner is a must for thriller fans!

Thank you to Steven Cooper for inviting me on the blog tour and for my copy of the book. Please check out the other blogger reviews below:

About the author

B.A. Paris is the internationally bestselling author of Behind Closed Doors, The Breakdown, Bring Me Back, The Dilemma and The Therapist. Having sold over 3.5 million copies worldwide, she is a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller as well as a number one bestseller on Amazon and iBooks. Her novels have been translated into 40 languages, and Film and TV rights to Behind Closed Doors have been optioned. She is currently based in the UK.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/baparisauthor