Before I Go to Sleep by S. J. Watson

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WOW!!!! This was easily the best read of this year so far. Before I Go to Sleep is a story about an amnesia patient Christine who wakes up each day not knowing where she is. She knows her own name but thinks of herself as 20 years younger, until she sees herself in the mirror of course. She lives with a man named Ben who claims to be her husband. He tells her about her condition each day and lets her know how to take care of herself while he's off at work - the basic things like where her cellphone is and such. After he leaves, a doctor, Dr. Nash typically calls her and lets her know where her journal is and that she should keep adding to it. He then shows up and takes her for his session as he wants to research her brain and help her get better. He tells her not to tell Ben because Ben doesn't want her to see Dr. Nash. He always bring her back before Ben gets home. When she opens her journal, she realizes the first words of the journal say "DON'T TRUST BEN". What a thrilling start!!!!!

SPOILER ALERT!

As the story progresses, we learn that Ben is a total psycho and he is the one that attacked her and caused the amnesia. Is there anything worse than sleeping with the enemy every night, working it out and possibly figuring out he's not to be trusted only to start over with a blank sheet of paper each day? The premise of this story is SO GOOD that I realized about half-way through that the author can take this ANY DIRECTION he wants to! I realized that I'm completely at his mercy and I'm praying on the inside that she would come out of this alive!! I literally was secretly threatening the author that if Christine dies at the end, I'm giving this book a 1 star, as if that would guarantee a happy ending somehow!

Thanks to Dr. Nash and Christine's determination of finding out the truth, she gets better little by little each day and in the end, figures out that her husband Ben isn't the real Ben - it's an imposter named Mike, who she had a brief affair with. When Christine tried to end the relationship, Mike attacked her by trying to drown her. She spent many many years in the psych ward and mental hospital. Ben eventually divorced her after believing that his hospital visits were making her conditions worse as she would seem more depressed on those days than others. Mike who learns Ben has left, pretended to be Ben and checked her out of the hospital and moved her into his house, pretending to be her husband Ben each day. The hospital didn't know of Mike's crime because Christine didn't have the memory of the attack. The hospital also had a high turnover rate of employees so they didn't know Mike wasn't Ben. Dr. Nash didn't know Christine was living with Mike either - he thought she was living with Ben because he never saw them together. As Christine's memory started to slowly come back, Christine figured out who Mike is. But by then, she has been tricked into taking a weekend getaway with him - the same place he attacked her last time. She angers him by telling him that she loves Ben, not him. He tries to kill her again and tries to burn her journal. (She had made the gravely mistake of telling him about her journal, which is what got us here.) She tries to save her burning journal, which caused the fire to spread to the bedsheets. She thinks she's going to die in the fire because she's bound, but she's OK with that at this point. The next thing she knows, she wakes up in the hospital surrounded by her best friend and family. She's told Mike is dead. Ben apologized for not knowing what had been happening - he thought she was still at the mental hospital. He wants to get back together. She realizes her memory is intact now. She wants to know how she was rescued. Dr. Nash tells her her best friend Claire was worried about her after she failed to call her at the agreed time. She reached out to Dr. Nash. Dr. Nash remembers Christine mentioning the weekend getaway to the coast. He guessed the location.

If you want a thriller that you just can't possibly put down, this is it. Forget about sleeping. You'll have to finish before you go to sleep!

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