“Suspense” and “thriller” are among the tags for this book. I wasn’t sure at first if those descriptions fit. The book is about a woman, Christine, who wakes up every morning with no memory. She has no idea who she is, where she is, or even how old she is. I figured this would be more of a drama than a thriller. But the suspense builds as Christine, and the reader, begin to question what she is told. What is real, what is imagined, and what is an outright lie?
This isn’t the kind of thriller where terrorists have planted a bomb and intelligence agents are racing to find it. This is a psychological thriller, which in some ways can be even more terrifying. If you can’t trust your own mind, your own perception of reality, the people around you, what else really matters?
When I checked out this book, I wasn’t thinking of it as an adrenaline book. Then I read the description of the genre in the Adrenaline Boot Camp entry – “To be called adrenaline, there must be a sense of impending danger, suspense, and foreboding.” Certainly this is true of Before I Go to Sleep.