Today, I’m a stop on a blog tour for Spencer Seidel’s Lovesick. Just the kind of thriller I  love.  A troubled girl, missing. Her boyfriend dead, his throat slit. The only suspect? The boyfriend’s best friend, Paul Ducharme, who just happened to love the girl, too. But now, Paul says he can’t remember what happened to Lee that night on the Promenade Trail.  And Wendy is still missing. Enter Dr. Lisa Boyers, a forensic psychologist brought in to help Paul recover his memories. Except as Paul recounts more and more, Lisa’s own past comes back to haunt her.

Lovesick kept me turning pages.  Seidel drops enough clues that my inner detective was trying to piece together the evidence. At the same time, Seidel reveals just enough and at just the right time that the voracious reader in me didn’t figure out the whole whodunnit and enjoyed reading until the very end.

Paul, Wendy, and Lee are all deeply flawed. At times, I hated Lee. Other times, I thought Wendy was a cruel manipulator. But at the same time, I felt empathy for each of them.  Without being melodramatic, Seidel gives us enough insight to each character to help us understand them and their motivations, but without revealing their whole story. Because in a situation like this- a missing girl, a dead boyfriend- when do we ever really know the whole story? Hindsight is great for speculating on motivation, and that’s what Seidel provides here.  We get the background we need, enough of the story to leave us satisfied, but not so much that we feel we completely understand each of the characters. Not so much that the story turns into something cliche.

Lovesick is one I read in just a couple of days because I couldn’t wait to find out what happened next.  If you like thrillers, be sure to pick up this one, now available in paperback.

There’s a scavenger hunt going on with the Lovesick blog tour. Click here to see how you can participate.