Welcome to my first post in MONTHS! You guys, I seriously didn’t think I’d ever be able to log on to Savings in Seconds again. We moved at the end of July, and then in early August my site went down. It was completely out of commission, and even HostGator was baffled. After many, many live chats and emails, they somehow worked a miracle and got it working again. I still couldn’t log in though — until now. Ironically, the tech who finally fixed it for me was named Jesus. I’m so glad to be back online and hoping to get caught up on all the posts I missed while I was locked out. One of the posts I missed was this blog tour for Behind the Red Door by Megan Collins.

This book has all my psychology-background wheels spinning on turbo speed. It’s a deja-vu fest for main character Fern — get ready for sudden flashbacks and repressed memories galore. While it’s not a surprising suspense story, my heart pounded several times.

The main mystery and twists were pretty easy to figure out early on, even with multiple red herrings thrown in for good measure. I still rated it 4 stars, though, because watching Fern’s transformation and growth was worth the read.

Big thanks to Atria Books for sending me a copy of Behind the Red Door! Opinions shared are mine. 

Calling all fans of Megan Miranda, Riley Sager, and Mary Kubica! Megan Collins, author of The Winter Sister, returns with this summer’s breakout thriller, Behind the Red Door (August 4, 2020; Atria). A gripping, sinister page-turner that seems ripped straight from the headlines, it centers on a woman who feels a mysterious connection to the victim of an infamous decades old kidnapping. Now that the victim has gone missing again, she must begin a race around the clock to unearth her long-buried memories—before it’s too late.

How well do you trust your memories? When Fern Douglas sees the news about Astrid Sullivan, a thirty-four-year-old missing woman from Maine, she is positive that she knows her. Fern’s husband is sure it’s because of Astrid’s famous kidnapping—and equally famous return—twenty years ago, but Fern has no memory of that, even though it happened an hour outside her New Hampshire hometown. And when Astrid appears in Fern’s recurring nightmare, one in which a girl reaches out to her, pleading, Fern fears that it’s not a dream at all, but a memory.

More about the book:
Back at her childhood home to help her father pack for a move, Fern purchases a copy of Astrid’s recently published memoir, which the media speculates has provoked her original kidnapper to abduct her again. With the help of her psychologist father, Fern digs deeper, hoping to find evidence that her connection to Astrid can help the police locate her. But when Fern discovers more about her own past than she ever bargained for, the disturbing truth will change both of the women’s lives forever.

Exploring the murkiest realms of the human psyche and featuring Megan Collins’s signature “dark, tense, and completely absorbing” (Booklist) prose, Behind the Red Dooris an arresting, heart-stopping psychological thriller that will haunt you long after you turn the last page.

Megan Collins is the author of The Winter Sister and Behind the Red Door. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University. She has taught creative writing at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts and Central Connecticut State University, and she is the managing editor of 3Elements Review. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her work has appeared in many print and online journals, including Off the Coast, Spillway, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Rattle. She lives in Connecticut.

BEHIND THE RED DOOR By Megan Collins

Atria Books | On Sale: August 4, 2020 | ISBN: 978-1-9821-3039-8| $27.00

It’s going to take me a while to get back to posting on a regular basis — we’re heading back to school “like normal” tomorrow! I am still doctoring the site, trying to update some of the posts with testy HTML that got the blog in tangles. It also looks like all of my categories and tags were lost in the chaos. Please be sure to check back.