Having never read anything by this author, I was really excited to dive into Anything for Her by G.J Minett. The concept had me completely intrigued; what if your first love came back into your life and asked you for a favour. What would you do? How would you respond?

Billy returns home to care for his dying sister and bumps into his ex-girlfriend, Aimi who, after eleven years, asks for a large indulgence: she needs to escape her abusive husband and needs Billy to help her fake her own death. He’d do anything for her then and he would do anything for her life, so he agrees but, once Aimi disappears, he has to face the possibility that her reasons for disappearing may have been more dangerous than she led him to believe.

The book started off strong and I was intrigued immediately. Told between three different time periods and multiple character perspectives, I spent the first 25% of the novel wrapped in who was who and how all their stories fit together. However, after this point, I found that the novel was really dragging for me. The execution became a little bit confusing and I felt my interest waning.

The novel felt like a slow climb; tension building and confusion mounting. However, I never felt like I was able to get any real resolution. I felt like there was this build up and then nothing. It just felt a little lacklustre to me.

I previously read and loved G.J. Minett’s debut novel ‘The Hidden Legacy’ but for me this story didn’t enthral me as much, although it was still a good read.

Billy has returned for a visit to his sick sister Mia. While shopping he runs into his old girlfriend Aimi and they agree to meet. Is Aimi a victim of domestic violence and what happens when she wants Billy to help her fake her own death? And why does Mia distrust Aimi so much?
This book is told in 3 timelines and while the years are headed in each chapter, it took me a little while to catch on there was a third. I don’t think I really ever felt invested in the characters until near the end and I was really wondering the direction of the ending.....I had no idea!
Over all the story line ebbed and flowed for me but there were some clever little twists there.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC to read

EXCERPT: Vicky Finn,meanwhile, was less than impressed.

'I think I just got snubbed, ' she said to her sister.

'You sure you've got the right person?'

'Oh yes,' said Vicky, removing her glasses and slipping them into their case. 'I spent an entire afternoon and the best part of the evening running around after her. I'm not likely to forget Mrs Vedra in a hurry.' She dropped the case into her bag.

'I'll tell you something else too - the man who was with her?' She smiled. 'That's not Mr Vedra.'

ABOUT THIS BOOK: You'd do anything for the one that got away . . . wouldn't you?

When Billy Orr returns home to spend time with his dying sister, he bumps into his ex-girlfriend Aimi, the love of his life. He might not have seen her in eleven years, but Billy's never forgotten her. He'd do anything for her then, and he'd do anything for her now.

When Aimi tells him that she wants to escape her abusive husband, Billy agrees to help her fake her own death. But is she still the Aimi that Billy remembers from all those years ago?

Once Aimi disappears, Billy has to face the possibility that perhaps she had different reasons for disappearing - reasons that might be more dangerous than she's led him to believe . . .

Sometimes trusting the one you love is the wrong thing to do.

MY THOUGHTS: Who doesn't still sometimes think of their first love, and wonder. . .

The premise of Anything For Her by G. J. Minett intrigued me, got me wondering just what would I do if my first love ever turned up back in my life and wanted my help . . . The prologue and first few chapters piqued my interest and I thought I was in for a really good read. But I'm afraid that, from that point on, it all went downhill.

Minett failed to provide any sense of suspense, which is what I was expecting. At times I found his writing downright confusing, and was going back to reread pages in an effort to get things straight. I was constantly putting the book down in favour of doing something else. There are a few twists and turns towards the end, but by then I had lost interest and just wanted to be finished. It seemed an inordinately long read, but at 368 pages I should have read it in a couple of days, not the four days it has taken me.

I still think that the premise is a good one, a clever idea, but I wonder if Mr Minett was trying to be a little bit too clever in his execution. Ultimately, like Vicky Finn, I was less than impressed. 2.5 stars.

Just because I found this to be an unsatisfying read doesn't mean that you won't love it. This is my personal opinion, my reaction to the book. Most reviews for this book are positive, so if you enjoyed the excerpt and like the summary of the plot, please go ahead and read Anything For Her by G. J. Minett. You may be one of the many who enjoy this book.

Thank you to Bonnier Zaffre via Netgalley for providing a digital copy of Anything For Her by G. J. Minett for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

Please refer to my Goodreads.com profile page or the 'about'page on sandysbookaday.wordpress.com for an explanation of my rating system.

This review and others are also published on my blog sandysbookaday.wordpress.com

This story is centered around Billy , that moves back home to take care of his ailing sister . He bumps into Aimi , the former girlfriend that was the love of his life . She soon starts to manipulate Billy . This is told in different time frames and was a little confusing for me . A psychological thriller with plenty of twists and turns . Thanks to Netgalley and Bonnier Zaffre for the digital copy in exchange for my honest review ! #Netgalley #BonnierZaffre #AnyThingForHer

A great read! Very gripping and great story. I could not put it down!

Gobsmackingly good! My favourite thrillers are the ones where you follow the story carefully and think you know what’s happening – only to find out you got it completely wrong! Never mind not being on the same page, I don’t think I was even on the same notepad!

Billy and Mia haven’t had the easiest of lives, as we find out through a series of brief flashbacks which fill in their history. Mia, as the eldest, has always looked out for and worried about her brother but Billy isn’t the youngster he was and is a lot smarter than he appears to be! So when he gets involved in helping the girl who was the object of his desires eleven years ago, he doesn’t confide in Mia, or anyone else.

This seems like a very straightforward read, until you realise that things are never what they seem and that taking things at face value just won’t do. However, I’m not sure that this is a puzzle for the reader to solve. It’s complicated, – exceedingly so – and very believable making it both exciting and scary! This is a well thought out and twisted book, skilfully written and disguised as such a straightforward read. I’m certain my mouth dropped open and I gaped at the revelations which, I have to admit, not only did I not see coming but never in my wildest dreams suspected were even there. This is a novel which I just couldn’t put down! If you enjoy a psychological thriller with a hidden outcome, don’t pass this one by.

My grateful thanks to publishers Bonnier Zaffre for approving my copy via NetGalley. This is my honest, original and unbiased review.

Aimi has Billy wrapped around her finger! So when he returns to their home village to help out with his sister, Aimi pulls him into her scheme to disappear. What follows are lots of twists and turns with pretty much nothing as you expect it to be. Perhaps one more twist than I would have liked as I got lost in them. I still think I haven't sorted them all out. I will say that I really liked the ending!

5 STAR BOOK ALERT! Wow what a read! I had seen many book reviews that reviewers claim to be as good as Gone Girl and finally along comes one that is, in my opinion, better than Gone Girl and actually very different entirely. In "Anything for Her" the main character Billy revisits his home town to spend time with his sister who we also discover is dying and bumps into his first love Aimi who is now married. It's not long before Aimi is confiding in Billy about her abusive husband and talks Billy into helping her fake her own death in order to escape this abuse - a task made easy by Billy's rapidly resurfacing feelings for Aimi. It's only following Aimi's successful disappearance that things begin to go wrong and leave Billy and the reader questioning who can be trusted.
The story switches between the present day and 13 years ago and is told from different viewpoints at times which all adds to the suspense.
Another highlight of this book is the characterisation by the author. The characters are so well-drawn and pull you in and I particularly enjoyed the relationship between Billy and his sister Mia which was so beautifully written.
Overall a complex, ambitious and thoroughly exciting read - well-deserved 5 Stars and a fantastic new author for me. I look forward to reading more of GJ Minett's work.
Thanks to Netgalley UK and the publishers for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I really do think that I have a love-hate relationship with thrillers. I was really looking forward to reading this one due to the high reviews that I kept seeing for this one. But, wow this one did not captivate me even a little bit.

The blurb really got me... and I was so excited to read something unique/different. The story dragged from the beginning and it took so much of an effort to complete this read.

The biggest issues that I had with this novel was Minett's writing style. It was very unusual and so unbelievably distracting yikes! The characters had no dialogue! It was the weirdest thing... Minett had dialogue using indirect instead of a one on one conversation. I was completely lost and could not follow at all. Maybe... this author was trying to be unique and this is how he usually write his novels but this didn't work for me at all.

Also, the story was told between multiple characters but the change and shift between POV's happened all the time and was too abrupt. I couldn't tell which character was who. This was so frustrating!

I feel like there was a whole lot of stuff going on in this novel and I just couldn't keep up. I should have most likely DNF this one but wanted to try!

I would not recommend this one. 2 stars on this one.

Thank you to Netgalley and Bonnier Zaffre for the arc!
Publication date: 3/22/18
Published to GR: 3/18/18

This is a gripping read and one which will have you desperate to know the outcome.
Billy is asked to stay with his sister while her husband goes away on business and while he’s there she breaks the news that she’s dying, and could only have months to live.
Billy and Mia have a very close relationship as she brought him up after their parents suddenly died when he was thirteen.
They spend some time together and whilst out one day they bump into Billy’s childhood sweetheart, Aimi. Billy has never got over her so when she asks for his help to leave her husband, he agrees without hesitation.
Things start to unravel for Billy when he’s visited by the Police and then summoned by her husband and and his family.
Events are not what they seem and we get a glimpse into Aimi’s new life and find out what really happened.
This is a really good read and will have you hooked from the first few chapters.
Thanks to Zaffre Publishing and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book.

Anything for her is a hard one for me to review as the ending was good but the rest was just ok.
In this thriller Billy is the main character, you get to know his early life throughout the book and the trauma he went through as a young child. The book flips between several different years, 2002, 2015 and 2016, which I found personally that I had to really concentrate on what year I was reading. In current time Billy has come home to be with his dying sister, whilst there he bumps into his ex girlfriend and arranges to meet her the next day. When he meets her he discovers she is in an abusive relationship and he helps her fake her own death to give her freedom.Only after he helps her does he discover things aren't quite as he was made to believe.
Billy as a character was not likeable I found him quite weird but I did like Mia, his sister and Aimi his ex girlfriend which is a shame as Mia doesn't really shine like she could of and could have had a bigger role in this thriller.
Unfortunately for me there were long gaps of where the author had built up suspense but then nothing happened leaving me struggling to carry on. The ending made up in some parts for this but it still left me with the memory of chapters of not a lot.
I would like to thank Netgalley and Bonnier Zaffre for tis ARC I received in exchange for an honest review.

2.5 stars

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The premise is promising and the book started out ok, but was just way too slow to hold my attention. Billy goes back to his hometown to visit his ailing sister and runs into his high school sweetheart Aimi. She tells him she wants to fake her death and disappear to escape her abusive husband and his powerful family. With very little thought, Billy agrees to help her and then the story becomes a confusing long drawn out mish-mash.

I didn't like any of the characters, including Billy. He has confrontations with the police, Aimi's husband and family and his brother-in-law, and I really didn't care. The book was told in 3 different time lines. Normally this help give backstory and move the plot along, but in this book it was just confusing. The story was really slow and I found myself skimming the last half of the book. The twists and turns didn't make sense and didn't keep my attention.

Talk about nice guy getting into a situation way out of his depth and control all in the name of love!

Meet Billy Orr, as a teenager the love of his life was a girl called Aimi, whom he dating for a while when they were teenagers but their relationship came to an abrupt end when Aimi’s parents divorced and she was forced to move away from the area to live with her father leaving him heartbroken.

Now 11 years on he is a successful London website developer running a business with friends and Aimi, having moved back to the town they grew up in is now married to the son of an influential businessman, the kind of man you wouldn’t want to cross or as an enemy!

Billy returns to his home town to take care of his sister who sadly is terminally ill, inevitably he soon bumps into Aimi and even though he hasn’t seen her in years he’s never been able to forget her or how he felt about her.

Sounds like a fairly normal average story so far right?

Don’t let that fool you, soon events take you into a rather unusual direction!

Aimi seeks Billy out and opens up to him about her marital problems, her abusive husband, her desperation to escape from him and that she feels her only way out is to fake her own death.

Manipulating Billy’s feelings toward her, his natural good nature and his desire to help her he soon finds himself part and centre of her plan to fake her own death.

Although Billy agrees to help her execute her plan he soon realises that, despite the careful planning, her husband and his family are suspicious and are not the kind of family that will let this go.

After Aimi’s disappearance Billy soon starts to question if she had other reasons for wanting to fake her own death and disappear, and that their actions might be far more dangerous than he first thought and led him to believe. He soon realises that her disappearance involves more people than he was made aware of and more to her story than he knew throwing his own life into turmoil.

The entire book is full of twists and turns, subplots and is a story full of deceit with a very unexpected outcome. The ending certainly caught me by surprise which these days with the market flooded with this genre of novels is a credit to the author!

This is definitely on my highly recommended read’s list!

**Thank you to NetGalley&the publisher for approving me to read this arc**

Recently, I’ve really started enjoying Psych Thrillers. However, when I started this book, I was like ‘not this kind of Pysch Thriller’ 🤦‍♀️. But towards the end of the book, I changed my mind. It was thought provoking and suspenseful right till the end! It was also quite creepy in certain parts but was still enjoyable! & it wasn’t that long which was great! However, The jumping time periods made this book a bit confusing.

This was a fantastic book, read it in a few hours as I just had to know.

Billy returns home to see his sister only to discover that she is dying. He bumps into his ex girlfriend who he has not seen for 11 years but when she asks for his help to get away from her abusive husband he barely has to think twice. After she is is gone Billy starts to wonder what he has gotten himself into and if there was more to the story than he was lead to believe.

Thanks to Bonnier Zaffre for a copy of this book to read in exchange for my honest opinions

I have a love-hate-relationship with thrillers. A really good thriller needs to blow me away, it needs to make me gasp and it needs to captivate me very early on. Anything For Her by G. J. Minett unfortunately didn't blow me away, make me gasp or captivate me whatsoever.

I was really intrigued by the blurb. Helping faking someone's death sounds like a great storyline for an ever greater thriller. Unfortunately, the entire fake death scene was not as spectacular as I had hoped. The whole book was actually not that spectacular. The story dragged from the beginning and it was exhausting to go through the pages. Furthermore, the descriptions of certain areas, locations and rooms were too wordy for my taste.

Another issue I had was G. J. Minett's writing style. It was very unusual and I never quite got accustomed to it. Although I'm not a fan of 3rd person narratives, this was not the problem here. The problem I had were the dialogues between the characters or rather the lack thereof in this novel. I am used to people talking to each other and telling their side of the story or their thoughts in direct speech. That didn't happen in 75% of the cases. Instead of letting the characters speak for themselves in 1st person and direct speech, Minett rather decided to convey the characters' words in 3rd person and indirect speech. One example is when Mia, Billy's sister, tells him about her cancer diagnosis. Instead of writing "I have cancer and this this the diagnosis... This is what you need to know now...", Minett wrote "... sits down opposite him and the dining-room table. And opens up. [...] So she talks. And talks. Eases her way into it [...]." It was just described in the oddest of ways but never from the character itself which was very difficult for me to follow. I don't know why Minett decided to write this novel this way, maybe it's his trade mark, who knows. Still, I couldn't get used to it over the course of the book.

What I also didn't like was the fact that the characters often didn't say what was going on and what was about to happen which is also linked to the 3rd person narrative somehow. Instead of just saying it, I had to read between the lines and guess what was going on because everything was described but not actually labeled.
The POV switch between the characters was also too abrupt.

The division of the book in 4 parts, however, was something I really enjoyed. The first part consisted of present and past happenings, the second part of present and future happenings and the third and fourth part consisted of only present happenings. All these leap in time chapters were supposed to contribute to the suspense of upcoming events. Although this only worked partly for me, it was a great way to approach the subject of the story.

I was really looking forward to this novel but sadly it wasn't for me which is why I can only give it 2 stars.

Try as I might I just could not connect with this book, I was really disappointed as I liked the sound of it and hate to give it a bad review but it just wasn't a good fit for me.I can only hope others like it more than I did.

*thank you to Netgalley and Bonnier Zaffre for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review*

2 stars.

Ohh yes I had issues with this book. But there were good points too which I will get to. But first the negative then the good.

It really really reallllllllllllllllllllly bothered me that the narrator kept suddenly changing WITHOUT letting me know!! Seriously!!!!!! This was SO frustrating. It really distracted me from being able to sink into the story as I was often having to pause to workout who was talking! This is a major no no. If it wasn't for this, the story could have gotten about 4 stars from me. Well, in the beginning anyway because about 35% of the way through, the story became less interesting and I started to get bored. I made it to the end though because I did want to have the loose ends discovered and I had hopes that it would have improved. Some parts it did, but not enough for my rating to go up. Another issue was that more and more characters were being introduced and that just got a bit much. Trying to keep track of everybody so this was another reason I had to drop a star or two. I think that if the issue with the narrators was fixed, I'd be willing to give this another go, one day maybe. But the old saying, 'too many books, too little time,' applies and with having such strong feelings about this book id probably leave it. 

The good. 
I do really like the cover. Thats what first appealed to me. It stands out and just looks really good. I also enjoyed the back story about Billy as a 13 year old. The first 35% of this book was really good. I felt like I would really enjoy it based on just the first chapter. Unfortunately I was wrong but I am glad that some people have really enjoyed this. I dont like being negative on reviews, but I keep them honest. I am glad that this book is liked by many as I know authors put alot of work into their stories. Unfortunately, I personally don't recommend it but thats not to say other readers wont. It just wasn't for me.

I absolutely loved this twisty-read which had a twist I didn't see coming!

Billy Orr returns to spend time with his sister at the request of his brother-in-law and quite by accident bumps into his ex-girlfriend who even after all these years he's still holding a flame for her. In fact he'd do anything for her.. Aimi tells him she wants to leave her abusive husband and asks Billy to help.

What follows is a rollercoaster of a read where you think you've worked out what happens when you are hit with a new angle to the story. Absolutely loved it!

I’ve tried a few times to read this. And struggling with the descriptions that are very detailed and so much so it’s lost my attention when reading.

A not for me but sure it will be for others