Review: Don't Wake Up by Liz Lawler

Fans of domestic thrillers will want to hear what Kerry Hammond has to say about Liz Lawler’s debut novel.

Don’t Wake Up by Liz Lawler was published on February 5, in Paperback, by Harper Paperbacks. It is the author’s debut novel and a standalone that takes place in Bath, England.

Alex Taylor is a well-liked and capable doctor at the hospital where she works in Bath. She leaves work one evening and the next thing she knows, she’s awake and strapped down to a gurney with a masked surgeon standing over her. She doesn’t recognize the hospital room or the surgeon’s voice, but she is terrified as he tells her what he is about to do to her.

When she next wakes up she is fully clothed, with no signs of trauma. But the worst part is that no one believes she was abducted or held against her will. They choose to think that she’s gone off the deep end and has hallucinated the entire thing. When people around her start dying under mysterious circumstances, the police begin to view her as a suspect, especially one officer, who has made it her mission to prove Alex guilty.

Domestic Thrillers are all the rage lately and Lawler’s book definitely falls into this category. You have a woman who has suffered a traumatic event but no one believes her, she turns to pills and alcohol to help her get through it, and while this is happening she becomes even more vulnerable to the person who is playing with her mind.

The author spent more than twenty years as a nurse and her knowledge shows in the story. I will be the first to admit that I read through some of the medical scenes very quickly; if it were a movie I would have closed my eyes. This was a quick read that kept me turning the pages, a good debut and a new author to watch.

This book was provided to Mystery Playground by the publisher. The review was fair and completely independent.

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