The Book:
What Remains by Wendy Walker
Published June 13, 2023 by Blackstone Publishing
Date read: June 11, 2023
What Remains spoilers can be found below, but they’re hidden under a spoiler tag so you’re safe to keep scrolling if you’d just like to read my review.
The Characters:
Elise
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The Plot (from Goodreads):
Detective Elise Sutton is drawn to cold cases. Each crime is a puzzle to solve, pulled from the past. Elise looks for cracks in the surface and has become an expert on how murderers slip up and give themselves away. She has dedicated her life to creating a sense of order, at work with her ex-marine partner; at home with her husband and two young daughters; and within, battling her own demons. Elise has everything under control, until one afternoon, when she walks into a department store and is forced to make a terrible choice: to save one life, she will have to take another.
Elise is hailed as a hero, but she doesn’t feel like one. Steeped in guilt, and on a leave of absence from work, she’s numb, even to her husband and daughters, until she connects with Wade Austin, the tall man whose life she saved. But Elise soon realizes that he isn’t who he says he is. In fact, Wade Austin isn’t even his real name. The tall man is a ghost, one who will set off a terrifying game of cat and mouse, threatening Elise and the people she loves most.
What Remains Spoilers
The Reveal:
Wade began stalking Elise and threatening her family and partner. Elise kept her correspondence with him a secret, thinking it would keep her loved ones safe to track him down and kill him herself. When she found him, she prepared herself to be kidnapped by him and let him take her.
Wade brought Elise to the Kill Room, which we readers hear about in another POV which seems like a recap of a cold case. He had kidnapped Billy Brannicks, who Elise knew had sold the gun to the department store shooter. Elise had said she wanted to kill the person who had given Clay Lucas a gun and turned her into a killer, so Wade was giving her the chance.
Wade was threatening Elise with her own gun, but Elise had loaded it with blanks. She knew of another gun hidden in the room they were in. When Wade tried to kill Billy with Elise’s blanks, she was able to kill him with the old gun. She instructed Brannicks to drown Wade’s truck in the river, take his bag of money, and disappear. He did.
The Ending:
Billy told Elise that the missing girl, Laurel Hayes, had told Clay Lucas about a man who was stalking her. Clay had obtained the gun from Billy and gone into the department store that day specifically to kill “Wade”. Elise had saved the wrong person.
I hope these What Remains spoilers were helpful.
The Review:
Thank you, Partner @bibliolifestyle @blackstonepublishing for this gifted copy of What Remains! I loved Do Not Look For Me, so I was especially excited to read Wendy Walker’s latest book.
The book starts with a shooting in a Home Goods, and I was hooked from the beginning. Our main character Elise is able to stop the shooter before he hurts anyone, but she feels incredibly guilty for taking his life.
The action continues from there as Elise gains a stalker and struggles to find his connection to the shooter. The story is consistently fast-paced, so I was never bored and finished the book quickly. I thought the ending wrapped things up beautifully, and I loved how the story came together.
If you’re a fan of stalker/obsession thrillers, this is a must-read.
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