I really liked this book to begin with but I just didn’t get where it went. The ending seemed quite disjointed and didn’t seem to connect for me.

This book has kept me on my toes from the very beginning. I raked my brain trying to determine who was doing this to Lily and Maisie and why The answer to those questions? You'll find out at the end. Very intense book to read. I loved everything about this book. I will definitely be looking for more of Parker's books.

Lily's break up with her husband was not amicable as a result she has become very security conscious. When the app on her phone shows someone in her garden wearing a face mask depicting her five year old daughter, Maisie, she calls the police. Although there is little to be done she feels very nervous. The next morning she wakes up as usual only to discover that although everything looks exactly as it should do this is not their home but an exact replica. Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to create this, but who and why?

This was a great start, but sadly for me it did not live up to its promise. I struggled to connect with Lily. Maisie just didn't ring true, she appeared far too mature & the least said about the ending the better! Thanks to Netgalley & the publisher for letting me read & review this book.

Lily and her five year old daughter Maisie Russell become embroiled in a nightmare when they wake up one morning and discover they are trapped in an exact replica of their own home.

This story held me captive from the very first chapter with its intensity and fabulous plotline. The succinct and concise chapters helped to ensure that my attention never wavered, even when there wasn't much going on. R.J. Parker's characterisation was well done, both in the creation and development of the cast members. They were believable and credible in their roles, although Maisie did, at times, seem older than her years in her thought processes and mannerisms. With plenty of edge-of-your-seat moments, While You Slept was certainly a creepy read. A really good psychological thriller with a cherry topped, surprising ending that I highly recommend to lovers of the genre.

I'm now off to grab a copy of this talented author's novel, The Dinner Party that I've had on my reading list for some time.

I received a complimentary copy of this novel at my request from HarperCollins/ One More Chapter via NetGalley and this review is my unbiased opinion.

I'm a big fan of Richard Parker's books and I love that while all his novels have unique plots, he is always able to manipulate our common fears to produce stories which are seriously chilling. An intruder in the house must be one of the most universal things to keep us lying awake at night but that has been twisted here in a unique premise which might require some suspension of belief but the result is a tense, nerve-wracking thriller.
The opening to the book is quietly terrifying; not much actually happens when Lily Russell's sophisticated security system informs her that there is an intruder in her garden. He doesn't do anything other than to look directly at the camera before leaving over the wall but I shared her horror when it is revealed that he is wearing a mask of her five-year-old daughter Maisie's face. The police accept that this is more than an opportune intrusion but are inclined to believe that her estranged husband is the most likely culprit. Lily is far from convinced this is the case but it's not long before the situation becomes considerably more sinister.
Our homes are supposed to be our place of refuge but Lily and Maisie wake up to discover they're in a nightmare. At first glance nothing has changed but then Lily receives a phone call from the man who was in her garden - and now the camera reveals he's in the house too. Except - and this is where While You Slept takes a different turn from the usual home invasion stories - this isn't their home. Somehow they are in a house which is an almost exact copy of their home, although on closer inspection there are little reminders that it is a reproduction and not the real thing.
Far more ominously, however, this version seems to offer no way for Lily and Maisie to leave. As they realise they are trapped, they try to discover the secrets of a house they feel they should know intimately but which has now become their prison. They don't know whether it is safe for them to eat the food provided for them but even more distressingly, their unknown captor is watching their every move and he doesn't hesitate to exact punishments when he is disappointed in their behaviour.
Who this person is, and why Lily and Maisie are in this position isn't revealed until late in the novel and we're not even given much of a chance to get to know them before they are taken. It means that even as we share Lily's frantic theories as to who is responsible for her predicament there are doubts cleverly cast as to her own choices, especially when she considers the events which led to her marriage breaking down, and I developed a few suspicions of my own about what was happening.
As it turns out, I was completely wrong and was totally blindsided by the eventual revelation. Although I suspect some people may feel it comes out of the blue a little too much, I really enjoyed discovering the shocking truth. While You Slept is probably not going to be to everybody's tastes; if you prefer your thrillers to be totally plausible then you may struggle with the premise of the book but if you are prepared to accept the situation as conceivable, this is an intriguing and very creepy story.
Although there are some scenes with other characters, including the mysterious perpetrator, a lot of the novel is effectively a two-header and I loved the relationship between Lily and Maisie. It has to be said that Maisie does seem to be a particularly intelligent five year old but I thought that made Lily's dilemmas about how much to share with her daughter all the more poignant. She is clearly a bright, perceptive child who won't be fobbed off with platitudes and excuses but she is still only very young and there's a moment regarding cereal box toys which serves to underline that. It's just the two of them working together against their unknown and potentially very dangerous kidnapper and I found the dynamics of their relationship to be touching and engaging.
Their plight may be extraordinary but their desperate, horrified responses are entirely relatable and it's this which makes While You Slept such a cracking thriller. Throughout the book I wondered what I would do under the same circumstances and so I was able to experience the sheer weight of their terror. Richard Parker is an author who never fails to deliver and I highly recommend While You Slept to anybody who enjoys original and engrossing psychological suspense novels.

This book FREAKED me out. It had me thinking how I would handle it if I woke up in a duplicate of my house, but could not escape. I read it late into the night as I couldn't put it down. RJ Parker did a great job of adding twists and turns that you would least expect, which just made it more engaging. Couldn't put it down, and would definitely recommend!

Thanks Netgalley and the publisher for the advance ecopy.

There was a man in Lily's garden but by the time she could get the cops to he home he was gone. Even worse was that he had a mask on that had her daughter Maisie's face on it. The next day when they wake up they appear to be home but they aren't. They're in a room that is exactly like their home a replica. Fear sets in and now Lily worries no one knows where they are and she needs to fight to survive. A Twisty tense page turning read!

likes:
- the overall concept of this and the first few chapters were SO creepy. I rarely get scared reading thrillers but this actually spooked me at first.
- definitely high-action and high-anxiety moments, reminiscent of No Exit by Taylor Adams!

dislikes:
- I'm convinced the author has never met a child. Maisie being 5 years old was absolutely ridiculous - the way she spoke and acted was nOTHING like a 5 year old. she would have needed to be at least 11/12 for her character to make sense.
- a lot of the explanations of the building or the action scenes were so confusing and I could not for the life of me picture what was going on.
- the twist is also ridiculous. it's great for a thriller to fool you and not make you able to guess the twist, but the twist and explanation has to actually make sense - this came out of absolutely nowhere and there was no backstory to it.
- the ending??? um

Oh wow I was all into this story! I was sitting on the side of my bed feeling totally creeped out and wondering how in the heck anybody could have pulled this off and why would they in the first place! I love being creeped out though so this was right up my alley at least for the whole first half of the story then it begins to drag and honestly began to get a bit boring because nothing else was really happening but that ending? What was that? I felt a bit cheated with it. I feel like so much has been left to my imagination and I don't like stories to end like that. I need closure and I don't feel like I got that.

I’ve read a few books by R.J Parker now and love how his books grab you from the very first page. While You Slept follows that pattern with a brilliant plot idea that I found absolutely shocking! You probably do have to suspend belief a little bit but I very quickly became sucked in by the traumatic events suffered by Lily and her 5 year old daughter Maisie. When Lily opens an app on her phone whilst at work one day, her home camera system shows a strange man in her garden. And if that’s no bad enough, he is wearing a mask made from a photo of her daughters face! How creepy is that?! But on returning home, and having called the police, nothing else seems to have been disturbed and her upstairs neighbour hasn’t seen or heard anything untoward either. But when Lily and Maisie wake up the next morning, they are in an apartment exactly the same as theirs-except that it isn’t! Who could have done this to them and more importantly…WHY?!

What follows is a race against time for Lily to get her and Maisie out of their “very familiar” prison and work out who hates them enough to do this to them! We do meet other characters and look for clues as to any reason they would have to imprison a mother and daughter, especially in such a traumatic way! I do have to say that I thought the perpetrator did come a little out of nowhere so I felt a little cheated by the big reveal but that last page definitely made up for it-what an ending!

While You Slept is a gripping read from start to finish with likeable main characters and a fast paced storyline that will keep you guessing.

This book had a great premise and for the most part an okay execution. So then why only 1 star?
I was overall hooked to the story, excited to see where it would go and then the ending came, which was an absolute train-wreck. In books the ending takes a very important role in showing how the plot is structured and thought out. And I think in thrillers, where the tension keeps rising up until the final pages, the ending is especially important because it shows if the author actually knows what they're doing. When it comes to this book, when the big reveal came at the end, it just made it seem like the whole plot was structured incredibly poorly with little thought put into it. So to say the ending was underwhelming would be a huge understatement.
I go into the specifics of why I didn't like the ending in the spoiler section in my Goodreads review.

There were more issues with the book, but they're all spoilers, so I just chose to address a couple bigger things in my review. I don't recommend this book to anyone and I don't see myself reading anything else by this author.

As a thriller this was not very well put together, it read completely disjointed. A backstory would have helped quite a bit. The characters lacked development of any form. There are many twists and turns, some of them making things more confusing. Don't count on an ending that will wrap things up as it's simply not there.

*4.5 Stars*

Copy kindly received via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Enjoyed this one, interesting read and interesting characters. Would recommend.

Hmmmm. HMMMMM.

This is not a "good book". BUT... is it the biggest page-turner I've read in ages? Yes. For people who watched the ITV drama "The Stranger" – based on the Harlan Coben novel – it's got a similar feel. It's utterly ludicrous and makes a suspension of disbelief almost impossible; it's kind of badly written; and the ending has no satisfaction... but you keep watching, or reading, regardless. Sometimes you just need a page-turner, especially if your brain has been particularly bad at focusing on tasks lately, like mine has.

But let's start at the beginning. Because the first few chapters of this book are genuinely the creepiest thing I (a self-titled wuss) have read in a long time. Lily gets a push notification from her home security app while she's at work – and sees a man standing in her garden... a man who is wearing a mask of her 5 year old daughter's face.

And that hooked me in instantly. The book does not let up on the pace or the tension once throughout, and I went from taking a month to get through my last book to struggling to put this one down. Things happen at breakneck speed, with building paranoia and dread chapter by chapter.

I was willing to give this a higher rating, just for pure ridiculousness, but the ending really let me down. I don't want to spoil things but there's little explanation for the mystery's resolve, the character resolve is entirely too neat and needed a whole load of explanation, and the final line is just flat-out gross.

I'll give it 2.5 stars and round it up to 3 just because it felt good to have a book properly hook me in, despite its flaws.

I loved the premise of this book.... intrigued to read it. But sadly it’s a not for me.... I just couldn’t put my finger on why.... its just one of those that I got 40% of the way through and my mind was wondering.

Sorry.... am sure others will love it.

🥳Happy Book Birthday🥳 to While You Slept by R.J. Parker
This book begins with Lucy at work watching a man in a mask of her daughter’s face in her garden. The guy knows Lucy is watching as he looks at the camera and waves. The police find no evidence that anything at the house is amiss. Lucy and her daughter Maisie (who is 5 years old) go to bed as usual. They wake up the next morning in what appears to be their house but IT’S NOT! It’s an exact replica of their home and they are trapped inside.
✨
The creepy factor here was strong, someone watching them all the time but they can’t see them and don’t know who they are. This person brings them food that they’re scared to eat because it’s probably poisoned or drugged. Lucy can’t think of anyone that would do this to them. She doesn’t think she has enemies. Obviously she’s missing something.
✨
I loved that this book started right in with the action! Perfect! The end was also good, and fast paced. However the middle was bogged down with plot lines and information that just didn’t work. I found myself distracted and putting the book down a lot in the middle. Although the end did pick up, the ending didn’t work for me, it was rushed and I don’t think it was believable because so little back story was given to help the reader understand why.
✨
This is a ⭐️⭐️⭐️ read for me. Thank you @netgalley and @onemorechapter for an advanced digital copy for my honest review.

I hate being this person, but this book unfortunately did not stick with me very well. I liked how it started off and maybe about 50 pages in, my attention started to wane. The title alone was why I picked this one from NetGalley, but it just wasn't the book for me. I did manage to finish it, but it's only 2.5 stars.

2.5/5 Stars

Oh boy!! This is such a twisted, frightening psychological thriller and a total nightmare scenario!

Whilst at work Lily Russell's home security cameras show a strange man in her back garden but what is worse is that he's wearing a mask, a mask showing the face of her daughter, Maisie. The police investigate but the man has disappeared by the time they get there. Lily carefully locks up and switches on the security alarms before going to bed but when she awakes the next day she senses something is wrong. It is, very wrong. She's in a duplicate of her home, everything she had there is in this replica but she's trapped in there with Maisie and with no way out.......

Talk about edge of your seat stories - this is such a scary scenario, so twisted, perfectly designed to keep you guessing and with an ending that has frightening implications . . . after all, if you're drugged, you really don't know what happens whilst you slept . . . .

I requested and was gifted a copy of this book and this is my honest review after reading it.

Waking up in a place that looks exactly like your home, but isn’t your home must be pretty scary.
Lily and her daughter find themselves in this situation and soon realise the only thing the other side of the front door is a dead end.
They’re being watched and listened to and can’t escape their kidnapper.
The idea is a great one but I couldn’t see where the story was going as they would either escape or they wouldn’t....
The revealing of the kidnapper was good but from there, it just kind of went a bit off kilter.
The ending just kind of happens with no lead up to it and even the explanation of why they were kidnapped seemed a bit of a stretch of the imagination.
This is a good read but a bit too unbelievable for me.
Thanks to Harper Collins UK, One More Chapter and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book.

Having not read anything by R J Parker I was suitably impressed that While You Slept gets off to a fairly explosive start, dropping the reader right into the middle of the action.
Single mum Lily is at work when an app on her phone alerts her to an intruder in her garden. Rather chillingly this person is wearing a mask depicting the face of her five year old daughter Maisie. Immediately I found this creepy whilst being intrigued as to why Lily feels the need for such clever technology, thinking the storyline was going to be sufficiently scary enough to make me sleep with the lights on! The only obvious culprit is Lily’s estranged husband Ewan but she’s adamant it isn’t him. After a brief police visit to determine the property is safe, Lily and Maisie spend their evening at home in the company of Paulette, Lily’s sister. Expecting Lily to suffer from a sleepless night I was surprised when the next morning rolls around without any drama. However, the most bizarre thing has occurred. Lily and Maisie have woken up in a house identical to theirs with all their possessions etc, except it is a replica and not their real home. How on earth has this happened? Have they been drugged? Why would someone go to such lengths to kidnap them?

Initial thoughts made me question the plausibility of such an event. If this is somehow connected to the intruder in the garden then there must be a strong motive for carrying out such an audacious operation. At this point I didn’t feel I knew enough about Lily’s background to hazard a guess at what forces were in play here, apart from knowing vaguely that Ewan was an alcoholic and had behaved erratically, unintentionally hurting their daughter and thereby causing the break up of their marriage. With seemingly no means of escape and no phone signal,Lily and Maisie are trapped and at the mercy of their kidnapper(s).

I was looking forward to perhaps learning more about Lily and her past, imagining there to be some long buried secret that could explain the current situation she finds herself in. Part of the appeal and fun of reading a psychological thriller is trying to spot the important clues amidst the red herrings, second guessing the author’s intentions and feeling incredibly smug when you do! This kind of drip feeding of information is crucial to build and maintain tension but with no potential clues I was completely in the dark. Frustrated at the lack of any backstory, with Lily’s character sketchily drawn, another major stumbling block in the narrative is the voice of five year old Maisie. Unfortunately it is pitched way beyond what I would consider the dialogue of a child this age to be. I had to keep reminding myself Lily and Maisie were mother and young daughter rather than a mother and at least a teenage daughter.

With no clues regarding possible motive or indeed culprit, I found it hard to engage fully with the storyline even though I was racing through the pages. I think I hoped that the next page would prove enlightening but I was sorely disappointed. Being hopefully of at least average intelligence and a voracious reader of books in this genre, I struggled to picture in my minds eye the layout and location of this replica house which made any potential escape route hard to visualise. There seemed to be very little build up to the strange and confusing denouement and where Ewan suddenly appears from is a mystery. I actually thought there was a section missing from the narrative because I was so bewildered. I even went right back to the beginning, convinced I’d missed a vital clue only to realise a vague sentence alluded to the reasons behind Lily and Maisie’s kidnap. But it is vague in the extreme and impossible to detect.

It isn’t very often that I’m inclined to give a poor review but sadly on this occasion the execution of the plot didn’t live up to my initial expectation. Plausibility is essential for me to really enjoy a book of this nature and disappointingly it is severely lacking here. To suddenly foist motive and culprit(s) on the reader in the eleventh hour without creating a well developed backstory makes the ending feel rushed, like a bolt out of the blue. However, as always I’m very appreciative of the opportunity to read this ARC courtesy of the publisher and Netgalley.