With thanks to Netgalley for a digital arc all opinions in this review are my own.

I used to read a lot of Susan Lewis books, I actually own 16. But I haven’t read any for ages (3 of those are unread.) I’m not sure why I stopped, but shall definitely dust off the unread ones soon.

If you want an emotionally enthralling family drama this book is for you. One Minute Later is well written, with engaging characters and a carefully plotted storyline.

Told from alternating chapters, Viv is a high flying lawyer in London in present day, who suffers a heart attack on her 27th birthday. Shelley and her family live on Deerwood Farm in the 80s. Viv returns to her family home while undergoing different treatment to keep her heart running until she can get a transplant. Shelley and her family’s stories progress until they overlap with Viv’s in present time.

There is also a lot of information woven in about organ donation that many people are unaware of unless they are on the waitlist.

Overall an enjoyable 4.5⭐️ read.

There’s a plethora of high ratings for this book on Goodreads but unfortunately I won’t be adding to it. This book was not for me.

Most of the book is written in alternate point of views.

The first, with a modern setting, feature’s Vivi who, on her 27th birthday, has a heart attack. Upon waking she finds her prognosis is not good. The doctors give her only twelve months to live unless she finds a suitable heart transplant donor. Obviously her life changes with this news. The high flying city lawyer personae has to go, and she’s forced to return to her hometown to live with her mother.

Vivi and her mother, Gina, have a tenuous relationship. This was one of the things that irked me about the book — the prickly attitude Vivi displays towards her mother. There seems to be no reason for it, apart from the fact her mother refuses to reveal who Vivi’s birth father is. Instead of Vivi accepting her mother did a great job without him, or thanking her lucky stars that her stepfather stepped in and took his place admirably, Vivi harps on, coming across as a selfish shrew for most of the time.

The second timeline starts in the 80s and follows Shelley and her family’s idyllic life living on a farm. I thought this storyline was one giant soap opera and my eyes rolled on more than one occasion when the plot took each predictable turn. I’m sure I’d seen every scene on A Country Practice at one time or other.

At about the 25% mark of the book, I could not see how the two stories were going to intertwine although, obviously, I knew they must. When they eventually did, Lewis tried to create conflict with the connection but it just didn’t work. In fact, for quite a while it was going in an uncomfortable direction which killed the book’s romance for me.

I doubt I’ll read another Susan Lewis book, I’m afraid. I just didn’t like her style. She had a lot of good ideas with this book, there is a plot, but she just didn’t execute any of them very well at all. Passage after passage about life on a farm followed by passage after passage of heart disease information does not make great reading. I found myself skimming more and more as I went along.

The climactic scenes especially fell flat for me. Lewis seemed to recap the outcomes instead of actually writing the scenes. That is, several times she built some tension, then resolved it so quickly with a couple of summarised lines instead of actually showing what happened in a scene.

If you pardon the pun, Susan Lewis’s heart was in the right place with this book but it wasn’t enough for me. Highlighting the need for more organ donation is very admirable but, written as it was in this book, it just wasn’t interesting.

2 out of 5