One Mistake
by Rona Halsall
Review

ONE MISTAKE

Sara made one promise to herself when she was growing up in foster care: that if she was lucky enough to have a family, she’d always do whatever it took to protect them.

Looking around her home with its cosy kitchen and living room, where her energetic teenage daughters and gorgeous four-year-old son all eat, play and live together, she knows she’d do anything to keep them safe.

So when Sara’s husband Matt loses his job and every shred of his confidence with it, she knows it’s up to her to bring the family back from the brink. Though she doesn’t know where she can possibly find the money they need to keep afloat.

Until her boss at work offers her a deal. He’ll help out. She just has to do him one little favour. But could trusting him save Sara’s family, or will it be a mistake that costs her absolutely everything?

RONA HALSALL

Rona is the author of bestselling psychological thrillers published by Bookouture. Her challenge in writing is to find domestic storylines with twists that her readers will never guess.

She was born in Nottingham, grew up near Blackpool and went to college in Leeds. She then moved to Snowdonia, North Wales where she brought up her family while working as a business mentor. She now lives on the Isle of Man with her husband, two dogs and two guinea pigs.

She is an outdoorsy person and loves stomping up a mountain, walking the coastal paths and exploring the wonderful glens and beaches on the Island while she’s plotting her next book. She has three children and two step-children who are all grown up and leading varied and interesting lives, which provides plenty of ideas for new stories.

“The inspiration for this story came from three different strands; news stories that I found equally shocking and which, when combined together, made a perfect storm.

The first strand is, sadly, a recurring theme in the news – innocent people being drugged and abused by a wide variety of perpetrators. There have been several such cases and it feels like a frighteningly common occurrence; one that tumbles an innocent life into a nightmare scenario.

The second strand was an article about mothers on benefits selling sex in lieu of rent, or to earn money to buy food, and it made me think about debt and how prevalent it is in our society today. How people who are struggling to survive have to consider the unthinkable just to get by.

The third element of the story, which really hit home to me after doing research, was the amount of abusive videos available online. We are talking millions. And these don’t go away, even if the perpetrators are caught and punished; the videos have a life of their own once they have been circulated. This means that people are re-victimised every time a video is shared. It makes you wonder if the internet is a blessing or a curse, doesn’t it?”

FIRST LINES

PROLOGUE

“Her head felt thick, stuffed to overflowing with all the worries that kept her awake. She couldn’t tell Matt, couldn’t tell anyone. It was the only thing I could have done, she told herself. And was it really that wrong? The answer to that was yes. However she might dress up the situation to try and disguise her actions, the answer was always going to be the same”

MEMORABLE LINES

“This was her world, where she’d felt safe bringing up a family, but she had a horrible feeling the past was about to repeat itself, rupturing the life she’d crafted, and there wasn’t a thing she could do to stop it”

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“What happened to teenagers? It was the weirdest thing. One minute they were all cuddly children wanting attention, the next it was like you had just stepped out of the grave and they couldn’t get away from you fast enough”

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“They drank their tea in silence, Sara thinking that her life was veering out of control, the people around her dancing to a tune she couldn’t hear, moving to a rhythm she couldn’t grasp”

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“Things had fundamentally changed, and like tectonic plates shifting on the surface of the earth, her world and Matt’s no longer fitted together. They were sliding in different directions and she had no idea how to pull them back together”

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“Funny how life had a way of slapping you round the face with things you said you’d never do”

REVIEW

“How far would you go to protect your happy home?”

This is my first encounter with author Rona Halsall’s writing, but it will definitely not be my last, that’s a promise! She has written nine psychological thrillers to date, with this book, One Mistake, sitting at exactly half way through the catalogue.

I do enjoy a tense storyline and this one ticked all the boxes, I didn’t even mind that there was no body count involved!

Now, how to set the scene without giving any spoilers away?…

Sara and Hailey are sisters, closer than most, despite having spent much of their childhood being cared for by the system, following the death of their father. They were separated into various foster families, with short interludes back with their neglectful mother, until her next bout of not being able to cope. Hailey is Sara’s senior and has a daughter Cassie, who is away at university. Although her marriage was brief and ended in separation, she is now quite self-sufficient and has dedicated her life to working with children in crisis, helping to give something back to, whilst hoping to improve, the care system which had never quite done its best for herself and Sara. Sara has been married to Matt for almost twenty years, having fourteen-year-old twins Sophia and Amelia (Milly) and late arrival, four-year-old Ezra. Life seems to be ticking along quite nicely for them, albeit with a few cracks beginning to show, until Matt receives some devastating news which will affect them all and Sara decides that, partly through a desire to regain some independence and partly through necessity, she must get a job, especially when she discovers that because of a costly and stupid mistake she has made, which Matt must never find out about, matters are ten times worse than they need to have been.

Sara has been volunteering a few hours a week at their local community centre, so when paid employee and one of her school mum friends, Fiona, is appraised of the family’s run of bad luck, she pulls a few strings and secures Sara a salaried temporary contract, which soon becomes a full-time permanent position. Within a few days, and because of the quickly deteriorating situation at home, coupled with Matt’s mood swings and sudden bursts of anger, Sara does something completely out of character, which puts her on the wrong side of the law and in the same position as her late mother had often found herself, something Sara had always promised herself she would never do. It also places her in an awkward position with the centre’s boss James, who discovers Sara’s deception and offers her a way out of her predicament – but at a huge personal and moral cost, although at the time she doesn’t realise just how great that is going to be! Matt meanwhile, has decided to put his IT skills to good use and when a client with a potentially very lucrative proposition approaches him, he sets up his own business – but this also comes fraught with challenges and some very unethical online content which, whilst it makes Matt feel very uncomfortable, he chooses to turn a blind eye to, distancing himself even further from his family in his efforts to keep his secret safe.

With Sara and Matt pulling against each other, both wrapped up in their own worlds of lies and deception and each reluctant to involve the police, things quickly escalate out of control and even the direct threat to someone they both adore, doesn’t have the power to bring them to their senses. Hailey and Fiona become the lynchpins on which the family all rely, but are they right to trust either of them? Eventually, with Matt still in denial, becoming more and more out of control and violent, Sara and Hailey need to have the kind of heart to heart conversation they thought they had left behind in their childhood, and when each manages to convince the other that they are still the closest of friends and natural allies, a plan of action is set in motion to protect those who are the most vulnerable in this volatile situation, whilst they bring an as yet unknown enemy to justice.

When the sisters eventually piece together what they think has happened, the instigator and insidiously manipulative force behind all their troubles becomes obvious and with a little help from a most unexpected source, the game is eventually up and the authorities are called in. Is there any going back, or indeed any way forward, and what future is there for this broken family?

This multi-layered, highly textured storyline was compulsive reading, which was intense and suspenseful from beginning to end, exuding a claustrophobic atmosphere so thick and cloying, I could have cut through it with a knife, and which seemed to linger, like a dark cloud, long after I had closed the final page.

Sara and Matt’s individual storylines were the edge-of-the-seat stuff of which nightmares are made, but unfortunately oh! so relevant to the fragmented society in which we find ourselves living today. One where a moral compass is all too often lacking. One small lie turns into a landslide of unstoppable deception. Fractured families slip through a system which is ostensibly there to help them, albeit with a tenuous security net which is full of holes. One where no one knows what goes on behind closed doors, even those of neighbours, friends or family. Where the opportunities to take advantage of the most vulnerable are seemingly limitless and almost undetectable.

Everyone appeared to be keeping secrets from everyone else and it was inevitably only a matter of time before so much deception and duplicity would cause a chink in someone’s armour, causing the whole situation to blow up in their faces, with a sure and certain outcome that other people would get caught in the crossfire and damaged in the fallout from the blast. There was a relatively small cast of characters, so just about everyone made it on to my suspect list to begin with. Even when I had narrowed things down to one or two names, those names changed every time the author added a slightly new twist to the storyline, of which there were many and I only worked out exactly what was going on just before the big reveal happened, so not a huge success for me and still a genuine surprise when the identity of the sole perpetrator of this devious, sick scheme, which was at the root of so much misery, was finally put out there for the world to see.

With such a morally corrupt and dangerous storyline, it behoved the author to present a cast of characters who were well defined and multi-faceted, yet dour and lugubrious by nature. This made none of them particularly likeable, trustworthy or relatable, so I was never really bothered about what happened to any of them. Yes, I might have started out by having some sympathy with Sara, although that quickly evaporated when her morals disappeared out of the window, along with her common sense. Why she would not have taken any one of a number of opportunities to confide in Matt rather than go behind his back in such a deceitful way, was only surpassed by her naivety. But what really turned my stomach, was that she selfishly put her own reputation and future before that of someone she claimed to cherish above all else, until Hailey took a hand in helping her see the error of her ways. Mind you, I wouldn’t have been quite as lenient with whining, whinging Matt in the first place. He was an unbelievable piece of work, who deserved everything he had coming his way. Definitely not parents of the year!

Although characters and plot are the two most essential elements of this storyline, the beautifully rugged Yorkshire location, with its wonderfully scenic Moors on the doorstep, is also described in sufficient detail, to afford a real sense of time and place, definitely more than enough to satisfy this most ardent ‘armchair traveller’, together with real place names which I could track and plot for myself.

What always makes reading such a wonderful experience for me, is that with each and every new book I read, I am taken on a unique and individual journey, by authors who fire my imagination, stir my emotions and stimulate my senses. This story definitely had the power to evoke so many feelings, that I’m sure I won’t have felt the same way about it as the last reader, nor the next. I was taken to a place I didn’t want to be, with people I didn’t want to be with and I was only to happy to make my escape relatively unscathed.

A complimentary kindle download of this book for review, was promoted by publisher Bookouture and supplied by Amazon.

Any thoughts or comments are my own personal opinion, and I am in no way being monetarily compensated for this, or any other article which promotes this book or its author.

I personally do not agree with ‘rating’ a book, as the overall experience is all a matter of personal taste, which varies from reader to reader. However, some review sites do demand a rating value, so when this review is posted to such a site, it will attract a well-deserved 5 out of 5 stars!

Thank you for taking the time to read my review, I appreciate your support.

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