Thank you to NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for the opportunity to read this ARC and leave my honest review!

What if one day, you woke up and realized that everything you thought you knew about the person closest to you was a lie? That’s exactly what happened to Regan when the FBI knocked on her door the day after her birthday and told her some startling news about her husband, John. Turns out John isn’t a financial advisor at all but the kingpin of a Ponzi scheme who actually is involved with dangerous criminals… and his name isn’t even John?!

As Regan learns more about her husband and has to deal with the invasive FBI agents as they begin to take away her assets to pay reparations to those who were sucked into John’s Ponzi scheme, she finds that John had even more secrets than she thought possible…and things start to unravel as she takes on secrets of her own. Somehow Regan finds herself playing a part in John’s crimes and as dangerous people begin to draw her into their schemes, she has only one mission: find out the truth while protecting herself and her kids from danger.

As psychological thrillers go, this one may seem more predictable on the outside, but as everything progressed, I was pleasantly surprised by the twists and turns we took with Regan as she tries to get to the bottom of her husband’s disappearance and his double life. I feel like a lot of thrillers tend to skip over the consequences of what happens to the families when the FBI and law enforcement get involved, but this one did a good job of showing what happens to those indirectly involved in the lies/secrets of those closest to them.

Definitely a fast read and highly recommend if you like psychological thrillers with characters that have big secrets and what they do when everything as they know it starts to fall apart all at once!

Poisoned Pen Press and NetGalley provided me with an ebook version in exchange for this review - thank you both!

This was such a great book. It has characters that you will feel for and the twists and turns will keep you highly engaged. I suggest starting this book when you don't have too much scheduled in the near future, because you won't want to put it down once you start reading it. This was the first book I read by this author, but surely won't be the last!

The Day He Never Came Home ☾𖤓
by Andrew DeYoung
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4/5 stars

If you’re into thrillers with a side of mystery and suspense, The Day He Never Came Home by Andrew DeYoung is a wild ride. Regan’s life takes a nosedive when her husband John, who’s supposed to be this perfect guy, vanishes right after gifting her a lake house. The plot twists and turns like crazy, and the dual perspectives—Regan and John—really add depth. It’s a slow burn at first, but once the pieces start falling into place, it’s hard to put down. Not everyone will love the characters, but if you’re up for a thrilling mystery with plenty of surprises, give this one a go!

I would like to thank NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for providing me with an advance e-galley of this book in exchange for an honest review. Look for it now in your local and online bookstores and libraries.

Regan and John are a married couple living a successful life. Regan a stay at home mother of two and John a financial planner. one night on Regan's birthday John gifts her a lake house and that is where everything goes down hill next thing she knows her husband is being investigated for Fraud and he is no where to be found.

This was a slow burn, a bit confusing at the beginning and took awhile to get me hooked. It was told in three parts: Part One from Regan’s POV, Part Two from John’s POV in which we learn important information about his past and how he came to be in the whole mess that he is now in, and Part Three where it’s all tied together. I enjoyed how the sections mixed together and gave you a slightly different view of the situation making them both seem a little guilty (communication is key).

Don’t skip the epilogue! Very important as it helps cast more doubt

Thank you to NetGalley, Poisoned Pen Press, and Andrew DeYoung for the opportunity to review this book.

The Day He Never Came Home was a well thought out and page turning thriller. I really enjoyed this one. Regan was an intriguing character and I loved the twist at the end about the whether or not the con is indeed over. John was a bit insufferable but I did appreciate the fact that we got his POV and his backstory. I also like how it was done as if he was telling it to Regan so we were hearing it at the same time she was. The multiple POVs was done really well and I appreciated the time spent on both. I definitely recommend this to anyone who is a fan of domestic thrillers!

This book was a great thriller. This follows John who works late and you know there’s some secrets he has and you’re wondering what is going on. He buys a lake house for his wife and kids and the next day he goes missing and the fbi comes to the house looking for him. It was so thrilling and the twists and turns were so bizarre, but great at the same time.

Thank you to the author, Poisoned Pen Press and NetGalley, for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. My apologies for the delay in posting this review, I read this a while ago, but am well behind with my reviews and trying to catch up!

This is marketed as a thriller, but I found it an improbable sequence of plot twists with badly-drawn, superficial and unlikeable characters that are each driven only by their own greed and forced to mouth horribly bad dialogue. Sorry, but this was not for me.

Thank you, Netgalley and PoisonedPen Press, for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This was a slow burn, and I almost DNFed this book. But when I got to John's (Casey's) POV, that's where the book piqued my interest. And damn that Part Three, where everything was tied together. Although I may say that the thriller element is lacking, it's leaning towards mystery (for me).

Overall, if you're into elements of betrayal, lies, murder, and fraud, give this book a shot.

The Day He Never Came Home by Andrew DeYoung is the kind of thriller that has you doubting everybody and rooting for everybody at the same time, with quick twists and turns and shifts in perspective.
At first it seems easy: Regan, a stay at home mom of two, fell for a con man and now the FBI is at her door, her husband is on the run and her life is falling apart. But as the story unravels, we see both, Regan and John, as people actual fully formed people who grew up indifficult circumstances. One in poverty bordering on destitution and neglect, the other one outwardly rich kid, but also neglected, and never living up to impossible standards.
Now, to be honest, building a life through a Ponzi scheme is quite obviously never OK but still I found myself rooting for Regan when she tried to get an in into her husband’s business dealings with a crook who needed someone to launder his money. Same with John when his past was revealed and then there were parts of his past that made me despise him … back and forth …
I enjoyed reading this book and I think other thriller lovers will love this book as well.

Though categorized as a thriller this novel feels more like a mystery to me. It was missing that sense of danger and anxiety that a great thriller has. The timeline isn’t linear which means reveals happen midway in the book which takes away from the big surprise moments for the second half - we already know what has happened. It became repetitive and predictable at times.

With that said, The Day He Never Came Home kept me entertained and was a mostly enjoyable read. Revealing little parts of John’s past and upbringing made for a well-developed (though wildly unlikable) character.

John was not the only unlikable character. I felt this could be said about just about every character. Every opportunity to make a decision it seemed that everyone always made the wrong one. Regan seemed to only consider herself, and while John claimed his actions were for Regan’s sake they were mostly rooted in his own pride.

Overall I enjoyed this novel and would recommend it for someone who likes a straightforward story with a bit of mystery.

This is a new author for me! I cannot wait to read more of his writing! I had no idea which direction this book was going in or who could be trusted! So twisty! I’m usually hesitant reading books with long chapters, but I breezed through this book in 2 sittings! I didn’t even necessarily like or side with any of the characters, but I was still hooked

When Regan’s husband John buys her an expensive lakehouse for her birthday, she’s both thrilled and ready to forgive all the ways in which she considers him a deficient spouse and parent. Frankly, she’s not at all misguided in her estimation of him: he works long hours and barely pays attention to their two young children, leaving the heavy lifting of parenting almost entirely to her. But when he gifts her with the gorgeous house of her dreams, she’s ready to consider his workaholic behavior a small price to pay for being finally and firmly entrenched in the upper middle class, if not higher.

When he doesn’t come home the next day, Regan assumes that he just decided to sleep at the office, something he’s definitely done before. It’s thus a shock when the FBI show up at her doorstep instead with a warrant for his arrest. Apparently, his high-rolling financial services firm was just one big Ponzi scheme. With the feds on to him, John has disappeared, leaving Regan crushed, humiliated and desperately unsure of what to do next.

As the truth behind her husband’s schemes and lies emerges, Regan learns not only that he was involved with some dangerous people but that his past was far murkier than she’d ever imagined. He’d always discouraged her from asking too many questions about his past, but the more she learns, the more she wonders about the man who left her so abruptly:

QUOTE
Did you grieve a man like that? [...] Or did you only mourn what he’d done to you, the sad joke he’d made of your existence, and celebrate the fact that he was gone? Regan probably should’ve gone to therapy to talk about it, and one day she even did some research, looked at some local [...] counselors online. But then she shook her head, closed the laptop, put it away. A therapist would only tell her something like, There’s no right way to grieve. Or: Feel your feelings. Why pay for something like that? She didn’t want to feel her feelings. She wanted to be done with them as quickly as possible.
END QUOTE

And so Regan decides to do whatever it takes to maintain her lifestyle, even if it means getting into bed with the same dangerous people who will stop at nothing to get their money back from what remains of her husband’s assets. Coolheaded even in the face of murder, Regan is determined to succeed where her husband did not. But how far is Regan willing to go, not only to provide for her kids, but also to solve the mystery of her husband’s disappearance?

Told from the perspectives of both Regan and John, The Day He Never Came Home very much reminded me of Lauren Groff’s acclaimed Fates And Furies, only reimagined – and more successfully, I’ll venture to say – as a domestic thriller. As such, the feelings of both main characters are thoroughly explored, even as their recollections of the same events contrast wildly. John is inarguably a sad sack, but it’s still impossible not to sympathize when he realizes exactly how trapped he is by the palace of lies he’s constructed to obtain everything he thought he ever wanted:

QUOTE
What he found impossible to describe [...] was what it was like to be him in the interminable months that followed, the daily, hourly, moment-to-moment reality of life in the prison of himself, the unrecognizable-to-himself man he’d become. The best he could do was to outline a state of blended resignation and despair. This was his life, there was no escaping it. And he hated it. Hated himself. Sometimes, late at night, he found himself wishing fervently that he could simply cease to be–a wish that was different than a desire to die. He didn’t think about killing himself, didn’t make plans, never contemplated methods. More accurate to say that he simply wished he’d never been born, like George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful Life[.]
END QUOTE

I definitely identified more with John’s attempts to overcome his own hardscrabble beginnings than I did with Regan’s constant centering of her own desires – a reaction I certainly hadn’t expected when I first read of his chronic absenteeism from the fabric of their family life. Neither protagonist is easy to like, though they’re both built so convincingly from the ground up that it’s easy to see why they make the terrible choices that they do. To a certain extent you feel like both of these delusional people deserve each other, especially in a book where there really isn’t anyone to root for.

I really enjoyed Andrew DeYoung’s previous novel, The Temps, about workers low on the tech industry food chain who are faced with the sudden end of the world. The ending of that book, with the one unlikeable character’s desperation to believe, really stuck with me. This clever spin on the domestic thriller revisits that will to make the impossible real by whatever means necessary, showcasing the author’s range while pondering further and with intelligence on a complicated theme.

The book description comparing this book to Laura Dave's The Last Thing He Told Me was spot on!

A good man gone wrong. Desperately trying to give his wife Regan all the good things she deserves, John Peters works late into the night as a financial advisor. He's never talked about his family, and Regan assumes that's because his parents are dead and his childhood wasn't great. Little does she know he's been living a lie. And she's about to be pulled into it. The addition of an investigation by two FBI agents adds a complication that Regan never expected.

Regan's character arc was wonderfully done as we watch her go from naive wife, to remain one step ahead of the FBI and the criminal who is pursuing her.

This is the author's first domestic thriller and what a great debut into that genre!

Thanks to NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for an advance reader's copy.

Lots of twists and wonderful suspense! Reading about each person and their part in a story is so involved. I was pulled in from the start and liked how I understood why and how a character reacted. Recommend.

“What was love, anyway, but the feeling of being tied up with someone, so deeply connected that it was impossible to root them out of your life without pulling out whole pieces of yourself? It didn’t have to be a good thing, a pleasant thing. Love could be terrible, too.”


I came across this book because it was recommended by an author I really enjoy: Nicole Baart. I was intrigued by the title and premise because it reminded me of The Last Thing He Told Me which I really liked. I gave it a shot.

It was a bit different than I was expecting but still an enjoyable read.


I thought it was funny that the main character, Regan (pronounced Ree-gan), was a graphic designer and her husband, John, was a financial advisor, because my husband is a financial advisor and I went to college for graphic design! And at the time I was reading this book, which is set in Minnesota, I was in Bloomington Minnesota and had visited Minnetonka Falls just a day before I read that scene in the book. Fun relatables.


The thing that disappointed me about the book was that there was more language and sexual content than I was expecting. Baart’s books are pretty clean so I assumed what she was recommending would largely be too. So I didn’t care for all of that, but the story itself was still good and worth reading.


The premise is this:

“The day before he went missing, Regan’s husband bought her a lake house.”

A very expensive lake house. Once she discovered he didn’t come home that night the FBI show up at her door to arrest her husband for fraud. A Ponzi scheme.

She doesn’t tell the FBI about the house but instead sneaks over there to find her husband. Instead she finds a bag with a million dollars in cash waiting for her.

Her life starts to unravel as she realizes her husband is not the man she thought he was and now she’s caught in the middle of his crimes with two children to still provide for and a narcissistic mother in the wings saying ‘I told you so.’

Regan will do whatever it takes to protect herself and her children, but is she just digging herself deeper into the fray?



The book starts from Regan’s POV. She gives us background into her and John’s relationship, how they met, and some red flags she noticed along the way but chose to ignore.

About halfway through the book shifts to John’s POV. He goes through some of the same events and encounters but from his perspective, filling in the blanks or ‘correcting’ for us readers what Regan thought was happening.

Part 3 changes to third person narration as it combines the characters for the climax of the book.

I’m not sure I ever really found the characters likeable. There were parts of each of them that were just dysfunctional or choices they made I found stupid. I mostly felt bad for their kids.

It did seem like John’s chapters were meant to earn him some sympathy and understanding as if he had no choice to do what he did or at least there were other things to blame, but there was no sympathy from me over here.

And the last few sentences wasn’t a huge surprise to me considering what I already thought about the characters.

So if you read books to really connect to the characters and invest in their lives, you might not find that here.

But the first line draws you in, the anticipation of finding out who John really is and how things got to this point, and how Regan will get out of it are the things that keep you reading.



Recommendation

For the most part I would recommend this book. It’s a pretty quick read and has good bones.

The only reason I would deter you from reading would be if the language and sexual content is something you would like to avoid.


[Content Advisory: 65 f-words, 35 s-words, 6 uses of God’s name in vain, several sexual scenes not super graphic but more than passing references, one of them infidelity]


**Received an ARC via NetGalley and the author in exchange for an honest review**

Regan and John are a married couple with two young children. John is a financial advisor, and Regan is a stay-at-home mom. The night after John buys Regan a beautiful lake house for her birthday, he goes to his office and never returns home. Now with the FBI investigating John, Regan must find a way to keep her and her children safe and keep the FBI from taking all her assets.

This is an excellent thriller that kept me wondering what John and even Regan were up to. The author does such a great job of writing characters that are difficult to like or have sympathy for. The story goes back in time to when John was younger, and it gives you so much insight into what caused John to become the man he is.

This book has a little bit of everything. There's lying, cheating, and murder. If you like thrillers, then you will love this one. I understand the author has a new book coming out next year, and it will definitely be an autobuy for me.

Oh my what a fast-paced story with many many twists and turns. A seemingly happy couple is celebrating their beautiful new lake house one day and the next morning the husband is gone. I could not stop reading this book. The lies and secrets on all sides kept me guessing until the very end!!!

Ⓑⓞⓞⓚ Ⓡⓔⓥⓘⓔⓦ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝔻𝕒𝕪 𝕋𝕙𝕒𝕥 ℍ𝕖 ℕ𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕣 ℂ𝕒𝕞𝕖 ℍ𝕠𝕞𝕖
𝗔𝗻𝗱𝗿𝗲𝘄 𝗗𝗲𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗴
Domestic Thriller
368 pages

Sʜᴏᴿᴛ Sʏɴᴏᴘsɪs
Regan and John seem to have a good relationship, financial security, and two beautiful children.
There is more to their story than the eye can see though.

Mʸ Tᴴᴼᵁᴳᴴᵀs
This is a spectacular story for the author’s first domestic thriller!

I’d say this story is character-driven. Regan and John have strong personalities. Unlikable or likable, you decide. I changed my opinion as the story progressed.

I figured out one twist, but there were other surprises that I didn’t see coming. There is so much more to the story than I expected, based on what was happening.

This well-written, intriguing, and clever story takes the mind on a riveting ride.

💕Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for providing this ebook for me to read and review.

I really enjoyed this book. It kept me thinking the whole way through and for a while after I finished. I loved the dual POV.