Lena’s Reviews > Behind Closed Doors > Status Update

The main characters in the story are Grace and Jack, who are newlyweds that appear to have the most perfect loving marriage. Grace has a younger sister with down syndrome known as Millie. One day, Grace and Millie were in the park, and Millie gets up to dance to the band that’s playing, and Jack joins her. Him and Grace end up talking falling in love and getting married six months later. The author creates this initial imagery that they have the absolute perfect marriage, but little do we know, and as revealed to us later, Jack is an absolute psychopath who gets off on instilling fear, and hurting women. Millie is in a school that is able to accept her and guide her, and she has a caretaker named Janice. The school is for individuals with varying mental abilities. Grace visits, Millie every week or so at the school. When Jack and Grace get married, Millie is their maid of honor. Jack is walking with Millie up the stairs once she takes a giant tumble. This was the first time we knew that there was an issue with Jack. Millie is taken to the hospital, but Jack and Grace end up getting married. After their wedding, they go to the airport, and Jack refuses to take Grace to see Millie, who is injured in the hospital. They end up going to Thailand, where basically Jack locks gray up in a room, and tells her the story of basically his dad being an awful abusive person towards his mother. The father got off on the abuse, and Jack grew to love it. He became obsessed with seeing people in the state of fear and inflicting abuse and psychological trauma and horror. He ends up, killing his mother and framing the Father for it. This is when we come to understand that Jack is an absolute psychopath. Throughout the book, he can still psychological torture on grace by locking her up in a room and punishing her every time she tries to escape. One of the punishments is by withholding visits with Millie and making up these very lame excuses. He states that his goal in marrying grace was to get to Millie. Because he knew that her mental status wasn’t well that she would be more scared more quickly. And he basically wanted to throw grace away and just instill torture and who onto Millie.

Multiple times throughout the saga, it seemed like Grace had an opportunity to run away or to draw attention to her situation, being held hostage, but she was an absolute idiot. One day, her and Millie are on a visit and sneak away to the bathroom and Millie hands grace a handful of sleeping pills. Millie had pretended to have an issue sleeping so that she could get these pills, and she handed them off to Grace, who was unwilling at first because she didn’t wanna kill Jack.

Realizing that Millie would soon graduate from her school and be forced to come live with them, Grace knew that she had to take care of Jack. Essentially, after a lot of rigmarole, she spikes his drink with a sleeping pill, and pretends to run away. Jack comes looking for her, but she notices that his speech is getting slurred from the overdose of pills. She runs to the basement which locks from the outside, and somehow gets Jack to go into that room and locks him inside. She then makes a phone call to one of their family friends, Esther, and tells her that she needs a ride to the airport. Jack a lawyer had just lost his first major trial, so she told Esther that he was so bummed and wanted to stay home to take care of final paperwork. She then goes to Thailand and leave him a series of voicemails asking where he is and in updating him on her trip. She then after a few days calls, Jack’s law, firm partner named Adam, to let him know that she hasn’t seen or heard from him. Adam advances this to the police and they go to the house only to find that he was in the basement dungeon and had locked himself in and had overdosed on pills. Members of the British embassy come to visit grace in Thailand. She had made some friends while there that were comforting her and told her to stay there for a little bit longer.

The officials let Grace know that Jack had died in that room, and that she should go back to the UK. She goes back to the UK and while she’s on the flight, she’s trying to think of how to explain the fact that there was pills in his system, as well as the fact of why he was in that room. She is then picked up by the friend Esther, who happened to be married to Adam, the lawyer partner. Esther takes grace to a café were basically she slowly gives grace information about what to tell the police so that she’s not accused of Jack’s murder. It turns out that Esther had a feeling that something was wrong with Jack, and that he was a psychopath. And at the very end, Esther asks Grace what the paint color of Millie‘s room was. It’s important to know that throughout the book we’re let know that Millie‘s favorite color is yellow. Jack created a room upstairs and their new home that was painted yellow that was supposed to be the fake room for Millie however, the room he wanted her to stay in is the red basement room in order to torture her. Esther somehow knew that the red room was actually for Millie, because Jack had let that slip a couple of times. And basically she found out that Jack wanted to torture Millie, which is why she’s helping Grace get away with the murder. The book ended on a somewhat happy note due to the fact that Jack was no longer there, and Millie and Grace could go on to live a normal life without him.

This was definitely a very dark, psychological, thriller, and at some point, it was too difficult to listen to, because of how incredibly dark it was. Jack was definitely an absolute psychopath, but he kept alluding to the things that he was going to do instead of stating them outright. This lent a kind of eye roll, as there was all these vague threats. Also, the fact that Grace had numerous opportunities to let somebody know that something was wrong, and yet seemed to ignore all of them was absolutely infuriating. Even when Millie handed grace, the sleeping pills, and grace initially refused them because she didn’t wanna kill Jack, even knowing that he was going to kill and abuse both her and her sister was absolutely infuriating, and it lens the reader to be a lot less empathetic because she’s so incredibly dumb. Overall, I did not like the story, it was far too dark, and far too frustrating, particularly given how incredibly gullible and slow the main character was. I do not think I would recommend this book.