What She Forgot by S. W. Vaughn

​Rules to creating a popular book.
Check what genres sell – thrillers.
Give it a marketable protagonist – female.
Give her a perfectly nice and normal life – but a mysterious/dangerous/difficult past.
Or if you really wanna stretch your muscles – a psychological disorder, obscure if possible.
Now have that past rear its ugly rear in her face. Do it, shred her nice normal life. Put that damsel in distress. Yeah.
Ok, now alternate your timelines. Past and present.
The resent especially rite in a very minute way – no detail is too small. That was you’ll get your word count in.
Got it all? Ok, now twist it. Do that twist like Chubby Checker on speed. Do it until the last chapter.
It doesn’t matter if the twists are preposterous, far-fetched, or logic-defying? If you do them fast enough and the audience doesn’t go overthinking them, you got yourself a proper modern popular thriller. You’re good. You’re golden.
 
S.W. Vaughn obviously knows the rules. She uses every single one of them to craft this tale of a serial killer survivor who two decades later gets her own daughter taken in the same manner she was. Sure enough, it’s a fun, fast-paced, freakishly overplotted and overtwisted sort of thing, but it’s entertaining enough.
Oddly enough, a lot (and I mean, A LOT) of the plot hinges on the fact that rape victims in this book do not abort. No matter how horrific the rape, no matter how young they are. This occurs not once, not twice, but three time. WTF is up with that?
Did S.W. Vaughn base this on some old bygone medieval world’s rulebook or presciently anticipated US’s hideous return to those days? Weird.
Other than that, a perfectly decent if somewhat preposterous thriller, perfectly decent for a freebie, at any rate. Reads quickly too.