A bit confusing and disjointed, and in parts repetitive, this was still an interesting read. I found Eleanor a bit all-over-the-place (the point, I'm sure) but otherwise beautifully written, and descriptive. Not my usual sort of thriller/mystery.

The first 90% of Ruby Falls is almost perfect. Eleanor and her whirlwind romance are completely believable. Abandoned by her father, she clings to the hope that this mysterious foreign man loves her. Even when he shows signs of not being the man she believes him to be, she forges ahead and tries to make things work. In another character this would be frustrating and I'd want to shake her and tell her to wake up, but Eleanor seems fragile and entirely dependent on this story she's telling herself. She's an actor playing a role that she's written for herself and giving up the role, admitting that her husband isn't who he says he is and their romance may be a lie, would destroy her.

The stakes get higher as the lies pile up and the deception can no longer be ignored. I was 100% on board, totally hooked, and could not stop reading. But then, one chapter later, it all fell flat. Any credibility the plot had was lost, and I was left feeling disappointed. **SPOILER** Psychological thrillers should pull the rug out from under you, make you want to reread parts to be able to see where you were misled and how the author was able to direct your attention away from what was really going on. But here? She just made it all up. The story that was told didn't line up with what we're supposed to believe happened at all. The amount of explanation and 'clean up' at the end points to how poorly this was planned. **SPOILER**

I'm still giving this 3 stars because 90% of almost 300 pages of perfection is acceptable. I just wish the ending didn't ruin the rest for me.

I thought this book was eerie and a good read! It is one of those books that once I finished it, I wanted to start from the beginning and read again to piece it together! The book kept my attention and fans of thrillers will enjoy it!

Was not a huge fan of this, primarily because it did not live up to my idea of what a REBECCA rehash should be. Good for those looking for a quick read of a thriller and for those interested in something that feels like a romp through tinseltown, but overall. lacked the subtlety and menace of the original.

Hold on a second, my jaw is on the floor and I need to pick it up!!!! WOW!!!!!

This is the first book that I have read by this author, and if it's any indication of what's to come, then I can't wait.

In 1968, Ruby Russell, six years old, is abandoned by her father at Lookout Mountain, never to be seen again. As a child, she is broken and the incident never leaves her. Even as an adult, she has held on to the fact that her father would return and because of it suffers from severe anxiety.

She has just finished shooting a soap opera that did not end well but is so happy because she marries an aristocrat after a whirlwind romance and they move to Hollywood.

This book had my head spinning as I could not figure out who were the "good guys" and those that weren't.

A heart pounding read that was tough to put down. The suspense caused palpitations because I didn't have a clue as to how this was going to turn out. And all I will say is, that it wasn't what I expected!!!

Highly recommend.!

OK - this was a strange one. During the first half of the book, I admit to being a bit exasperated with Ellie/Ruby and literally rolling my eyes and practically shouting at her not to be so stupid to believe Orlando! Joke was on me.

The second half of the book, the story sped up and what was real suddenly wasn't - and the true facts started coming out as the book drew to its conclusion. Quite a roller coaster ride! That ending took my opinion from a 3 star rating to a 4 star. I can't say more because I don't want to spoil this experience for other readers.

A gorgeous cover and interesting concept, referencing one of my favourite books, Rebecca. I just felt like the storyline lacked directions at time, found myself skimming a lot and so decided to DNF and move on.

Ruby Falls is a psychological thriller with more than a hint of Rebecca about it. Eleanor ‘Ruby’ Russell is only six years old when she is abandoned in caves at Ruby Falls by her father. This early trauma leaves her with a feeling that her father didn’t love her, or even worse, is she intrinsically unloveable?

Years later we meet her again, going by the name Ellie and working as a soap opera actress. When her character is written out of the show, she takes a trip to Europe and meets Orlando Montague and falls madly in love. After a whirlwind six months together they get married. But does Ellie really know her husband. Surely not. When she lands a role in a new movie of Rebecca they set up home in the Hollywood Hills. Surely now she has everything? But as her marriage slowly starts to imitate art, is she living with a psychopath, or is she not seeing things as they really are? With a heroine who might be confusing reality and nightmares, and a husband who seems to have changed and holds a few secrets of his own, I wasn’t sure what was really going on.

This book has a great gothic vibe throughout. I felt immersed in the places they visited, with great descriptions of food and their surroundings. I can understand why Ellie would be traumatised by the incident in her childhood and her father’s disappearance. There were times when I trusted her account and other times I just felt confused. I love Rebecca, it’s one of my favourites of all time, so if a book is going to reference it so strongly I hope it’s going to stand up to the original. This didn’t quite do it for me. There were times when I was a little bit too lost. Orlando seems like a classic domestic abuser, taking Ellie on a bit of a rollercoaster of emotions and manipulating reality. It felt like the twists and turns might never stop then the ending was very abrupt. There were parts that worked very well, but others that were a bit confusing.

I kept on until I finally read this book. There was just something about it that I didn't connect with. I'm not sure exactly where. As a child we went there. But I just could not get into this book. It seemed like it was going to be so good and at times I thought oh boy it's picking up. But alas it just did't do it for me. I'm not usually into books about soap opera stars or any major star for that matter. Maybe that was it though I really don't think so. I just could not connect with the characters. Any of them. I felt for Ruby but Eleanor just never grew on me. I just don't like books about movie stars I think. It could be just me and the fact that I kept picking this one up then putting it back down and never read enough at once to connect. It just wasn't for me.
I'm glad I did finally finish it though. I felt bad before that I wasn't going too.

Thank you to #NetGalley, #DeborahGoodrichRoyce and #PostHillPress for this ARC.. This is my own true feelings about this book.
3 stars

In 1968 Ruby Russell is abandoned by her father at the tender age of 6 in a dark underground cave at Ruby Falls in Lookout Mountain, Tenessee. He simply let go of her hand and he was gone. Fast forward to 1987, Ruby now goes by her first name Eleanor. She has recently been fired from her highly acclaimed soap opera role and is traveling in Europe. Meeting Orlando six months earlier on a plane, they are now married after a whirlwind courtship and settled in the cottage of her dreams in an idyllic Hollywood neighborhood. She has an amazing new role in a remake of Rebecca. All is good, but wait ... suddenly Orlando isn’t the man she married. Who is he really? Ellie is desperate to find out! Filled with Hollywood nostalgia, this book teeters on the gothic edge with just enough creep factor to keep the reader glued to the pages! Eerie and unique, Ruby Falls is a book you don’t want to miss!

An Actress with Daddy issues seeks a new Hollywood beginning in “Ruby Falls”

Lights, camera and action take center stage in Deborah Goodrich Royce’s new psychological thriller, “Ruby Falls” (Post Hill Press). Soap Opera star Ruby Eleanor Russell has daddy issues, and who wouldn’t after being abandoned by her father on an underground tour of Ruby Falls in Tennessee. He simply released her hand, and six-year-old Ruby was alone in the mist with a group of strangers. The childhood trauma has since influenced every aspect of her present life in the late 1980s, and she’s intent of starting fresh with a whirlwind marriage to British aristocrat Orlando Montague, the starring role in a gothic remake of DuMaurier’s Rebecca, and a new rose-covered cottage in the Hollywood Hills.
Life continues to be rosy as she befriends a psychic cat-lady neighbor, Dottie Robinson, adopts Bel, one of Dottie’s kittens, Howard her agent dotes upon her, and Orlando opens a glamorous antique shop in Los Angeles. Then...
In the gothic tradition, Ruby shortly enters an Alice through the Looking Glass existence. As in the movies, reality and fantasy blur, where every word, action and thought can be interpreted from contrasting perspectives. Ruby/Eleanor, who is a dedicated actress, becomes more and more embedded in her movie role as Lavinia Lange, and her actual life assumes a surreal quality echoing that of the tormented, innocent bride. Orlando, whom she married after knowing him for only weeks, suddenly becomes possessive and suspicious of her. He accuses her of concealing her father’s media-grabbing disappearance, and her real name. (She’s abandoned Ruby–who was lost in Ruby Falls–to adopt Eleanor as her name). And she suspects him of having an affair and seeking to steal a valuable family heirloom, a secretary.
Ruby/Eleanor’s deeply engrained fear of abandonment and growing paranoia threaten her new marriage and her new career. She wonders whether she is reliving Rebecca or Gaslight, where the manipulative husband intentionally toyed with his hysterical wife to make her believe she was crazy. She also wonders whether she is the unnamed heroine in Rebecca or the evil Mrs. Danvers? Most important, after twenty years missing, her obsessions over whether her father will ever return to her, and whether he left any clues to his whereabouts, swirl out of proportion.
In “Ruby Falls,” Royce incorporates her experience as an actress in daytime drama (Silver Kane, evil half-sister to Erica Kane on All My Children), television (21 Jump Street, St. Elsewhere, 90210) and in the movies (Out on a Limb) to take the reader backstage at the soaps and on the soundstages of Hollywood. Through her haunting references, Royce pays homage to Old Hollywood greats like Hitchcock, Truffaut and Cary Grant as her protagonist, Ruby/Eleanor, searches for answers about her past and present, and grapples with the tension between reality and imagination.
In “Ruby Falls,” Royce has crafted Ruby/Eleanor as a wily protagonist with many layers of fact and fiction. Each suspenseful page peels away another layer of Ruby/Eleanor’s facade until her true core is exposed. We learn Ruby loved her enigmatic father more than anyone else in the world, and she mourns him every day of her life. We learn that in acting, she can step into another person’s shoes to escape her past, and that her tragic memories are fluid and open to her distorted interpretation. And that she, too, is an enigma which keeps us turning the page.
Royce leaves the reader wondering whether her protagonist was the innocent child Ruby abandoned at the falls or whether she is the emotionally fragile Eleanor who struggles to survive every day. “Ruby Falls” will enthrall readers who love clever, twisty psychological thrillers, and the fabulous Hollywood ending will leave them wanting more.

This is an amazing and eerie story. Ruby’s father disappears leaving her alone at a beauty spot when she is a child. From then she becomes an actress, marries and buys a lovely cottage or does she? This is a creepy story and knowing what is frightening her is key to the story. What is true is the disappearance of her father and the answer to this solves the riddle of this novel. Ruby is frightened all the time and is nervousl of her new husband. Is he what he says he is or is this one of Ruby’s mysteries. We do find the answers but it is not what we expected. Ruby is a loveable and fragile character and we really feel her fears. This is an excellent and unusual novel.

The cover and title of this psychological thriller brilliantly represent Deborah Goodrich Royce's gothic suspense novel about an ingénue living in the Hollywood Hills, circa 1983. That's before you even open the book, in which frail but lovely Eleanor and her dashing but enigmatic husband start their lives anew in a rose-covered cottage. A recently "let go" soap opera actress, Eleanor lands the lead in a chilling, modern treatment of the Hitchcock film of Daphne DuMaurier's most famous gothic tale. "Rebecca but scarier." At first, all looks as rosy for the newlyweds as the cottage in which they live. But as in Rebecca, ghosts are hard to ignore. A succesful homage to one of my favorite novels, Ruby Falls gets a glowing recommendation from me. I could not put the book down, and the ending did not disappoint this avid DuMaurier fan.
[Thanks to Permuted Press and NetGalley for an opportunity to read an ARC of this book in exchange for my opinion.]

This book will suck you in immediately and not let you go. I don't always love unreliable narrators but this one was perfect. I felt for Eleanor and I believed her but I was also dying to find out what would happen. This is definitely a fast paced read, at least it was for me, and I enjoyed it immensely. I definitely recommend this to fans of Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier; you will love this book!

Ruby Falls comes out TOMORROW on May 4, 2021, and you can purchase HERE! I definitely recommend this one!

"I understand you're not working at the moment, Ellie?" It was incredible how she phrased these things. She opted not to say that my mother had told her this. Instead, she told me that she understood it, like it had come to her through some intuitive ability. Like she had divined it out of the pouring rain.

For those who like to categorise their reading, defining this book is a challenge because it is almost impossible to place into a genre. The easiest is “psychological mystery” or “thriller”, but at times it seems to be fantasy, or crime of the “mysterious disappearance” type or perhaps the “criminal seduction” type. What it can be classified as is a brilliant, first-person, original novel.
In 1968 Ruby, Eleanor Ruby Russell to give her her full name, aged six, is taken by her father to visit Ruby Falls, an underground Waterfall in Tennessee. In the dark of the cave he disappears, no one sees him go and his car is found abandoned in the car park. This traumatic event colours her life as she grows up; among other things she rejects Ruby as her name and insists on being Eleanor, or Ellie.
By 1987 she has become an actress in a TV soap based in New York. Fired from this job she travels to Europe and, on a flight from Zurich she meets a handsome, rich, Englishman called Orlando Montague who just happens to be an antiques dealer, her father’s job. He also just happens to have his mother’s ring in his pocket and, following a whirlwind six week romance, they marry in a small Italian town.
Returning to the USA, they use her money to buy a cottage in the Hollywood hills and set him up in business. Landing the lead in a gothic horror film based on “Rebecca”, her time is occupied, and his business keeps him busy, so the dynamic in the marriage changes. Then one day, chasing her cat which has strayed across the road, she meets Dottie an old lady who seems to have a psychic awareness of everything about her life.
And then it starts to get really complicated and the reader sinks happily into her mind trying to fathom what the hell is going on!
The author has been an actress in a soap and appeared in horror films, so there is a feeling of authority in the background. What also stands out is the voice of the narrator, Ruby/Ellie, which has tones of the mid-twenties woman and the six year old girl who are amalgamated in her. Reading this has been one of the most enjoyable experiences I have had this year.
I would like to thank NetGalley, the publishers and the author for providing me with a draft proof copy for the purpose of this review.

Ruby Falls offers a riff on Daphne du Maurier’s REBECCA in an updated tale of Eleanor Ruby Russell, a soap opera drama star, who gets fired then lands a spot in a movie remake of Rebecca with a twist. Eleanor’s new husband doesn’t seem to be the person he’s portraying himself as being.

If you like I reliable narrators, this might be your perfect summer read,

Paying homage to Rebecca, Ruby Falls is narrated by Eleanor Russell, a fired former soap opera actress whose father left her in an underground cave and completely disappeared when she was six, and who now has married a man she barely knows and is starring in a remake of the movie version of Rebecca.

If this sounds like a lot, it is. If this sounds strange, it is. But somehow Goodrich Royce makes it work. The first few chapters did leave me confused and unsure if I wanted to continue reading. I am glad I kept going. It's an intense read, that becomes masterfully creepy at times, and is absolutely fascinating. The ending left me stunned, but fit when I looked back at everything I had previously read.

If this sounds interesting to you, I would definitely give this book a chance. Give it a couple chapters before you decide how you feel. I don't think this is a book everyone will like, but once I got into it, I couldn't put it down.

Ruby Falls by Deborah Goodrich Joyce centers around young Ruby who, as a little girl, was left behind in a cave. Yes, her father just walked out on his child in the middle of a dark cave and she never saw him again. Years later, Ruby is left behind and Eleanor is a soap opera actress who runs to Europe and marries a man named Orlando. She doesn’t talk about her past. Eleanor and Orlando move to Los Angeles and Eleanor is excited to star in a film adaptation of Rebecca.

She is thrilled with this new role but can’t help wonder why Orlando is acting so strange. Her life is suddenly a mirror of the movie she is making. What is going on?

Synopsis:

On a brilliantly sunny July day, six-year-old Ruby is abandoned by her father in the suffocating dark of a Tennessee cave. Twenty years later, transformed into soap opera star Eleanor Russell, she is fired under dubious circumstances. Fleeing to Europe, she marries a glamorous stranger named Orlando Montague and keeps her past closely hidden.

Together, Eleanor and Orlando start afresh in LA. Setting up house in a storybook cottage in the Hollywood Hills, Eleanor is cast in a dream role—the lead in a remake of Rebecca. As she immerses herself in that eerie gothic tale, Orlando’s personality changes, ghosts of her past re-emerge, and Eleanor fears she is not the only person in her marriage with a secret.

In this thrilling and twisty homage to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, the story ricochets through the streets of Los Angeles, a dangerous marriage to an exotic stranger, and the mind of a young woman whose past may not release her.

I was engaged from start to finish, wondering what was going to happen to Eleanor. This comes out on May 4, definitely get a copy!

Ruby has a secret that’s overshadowed her whole life.
She’s a soap opera star recently unemployed and newly married making her way to Hollywood hoping for bigger and better things.
It does go a little bit all over the place but I did like that each chapter had a cinematic aspect. There was an avenue pertaining to the secret that was mildly explored that I wish were left unmentioned altogether.
Read this book in its entirety if you happen to pick it up. I’m glad I did. The latter half of the book is more deftly crafted then the first part.
This is completely inconsequential to a book review but I can see this being optioned into a pretty fantastic movie or mini-series. All of the elements are there.

Intriguing, fast paced, and highly captivating with gothic flare, it is an interesting story of a six years old girl who was abondoned/left by her father during a cave tour. Characters development is great and i enjoyed tye character of Ruby who becomes an acress in later life and mysterious. Highly recommended