Audiobook Review – Little Black Lies by Sandra Block

Posted 9 April, 2015 by Heather in Blog, Book Review, Heather, Heather Book Review / 2 Comments

I received this book for free from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Audiobook Review – Little Black Lies by Sandra BlockLittle Black Lies Published by Grand Central Publishing, Hachette Audio on February 17, 2015
Genres: Adult, Contemporary, Depression & Mental Illness, Mystery, Psychological Suspense, Suspense
Pages: 352
Format: Audiobook
Source: Publisher
Buy on Amazon
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3.5 Stars

She helps people conquer their demons. But she has a few of her own...

In the halls of the psychiatric ward, Dr. Zoe Goldman is a resident in training, dedicated to helping troubled patients. However, she has plenty of baggage of her own. When her newest patient arrives - a beautiful sociopath who murdered her mother - Zoe becomes obsessed with questions about her own mother's death. But the truth remains tauntingly out of reach, locked away within her nightmares of an uncontrollable fire. And as her adoptive mother loses her memory to dementia, the time to find the answers is running out.

As Zoe digs deeper, she realizes that the danger is not just in her dreams but is now close at hand. And she has no choice but to face what terrifies her the most. Because what she can't remember just might kill her.

Little Black Lies is about madness and memory - and the dangerous, little lies we tell ourselves just to survive.

audiobook

Dr. Zoe Goldman is a psychiatric resident, doing her time at a hospital while juggling her responsibility to her adoptive mother who is starting to lose her memory and is now in a nursing home. When treating a new patient, who has been in psychiatric wards for the past 20 years because she killed her own mother, Zoe starts to have nightmares about the fire that stole her mother’s life when Zoe was just four years old. Thus begins Zoes’s struggle with her repressed memories and her quest to learn more about her birth mother while her adoptive mother still has some sense of self left.

This new patient Sofia Vollano is up for release, but Zoe isn’t sure that this is the right thing to do. Through exploration of repressed memories, dreams, even hypnosis, Zoe is forced to confront her own troubled past as it bubbles to the forefront while she treats Sofia. But can Zoe make sense of what really happened when she was four years old and will her dementia riddled adoptive mother be any help, or will she have to dig deeper and do some old fashioned research?

This wasn’t a book that had me guessing and trying to connect the dots along the way, so the mystery wasn’t that big of an aspect of Little Black Lies to me. Zoe is a sympathetic character, but the side characters like her fellow doctors and her brother fell a little flat and one dimensional. Her love interests were a bit better explored, and you get to see more facets of both them and Zoe which I enjoyed.

 

Rating 3.5

I give Little Black Lies a 3.5 out of 5. The writing was excellent–especially everything that had to do with psychiatric medicine and hospitals–but it was hard to get into a flow with the story moving along through Zoe’s life bouncing back and forth as she slowly navigates between her life as a psychiatric resident and her personal quest to find her birth mother. While the audiobook quality was excellent like I’ve come to expect from Hachette Audio, I’m not sure if it hampered my enjoyment of this book since the pace and thrilling nature of the story didn’t really pick up until the final quarter of the novel.

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Heather

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I'm a PhD chemist who loves sarcasm, music, and books-paranormal, mystery, thriller, suspense, horror, and romance. Most of my free time is spent at the martial arts studio these days--whether practicing Combat Hapkido or reading books while watching my son's Taekwondo classes, or even working up a sweat with Kickboxing for fun. Goodreads

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