Just got done with "A Slow Ruin" by Pamela Crane, and wow, it's like a roller coaster of emotions and mysteries.

The story centers around the life of Lucy, who's trying to piece together the truth behind a tragic event from her past. The deeper she digs, the more she uncovers about her family's secrets and the lies that have been surrounding her for years. It’s a mix of psychological drama, suspense, and some really dark twists.

The narration is spot on. The narrator does a great job of capturing Lucy’s inner turmoil and the intensity of the story. It's like they're right in the thick of the mystery, pulling you along with them.

Pamela Crane has a way with words that just hooks you in. Her writing is sharp, immersive, and really gets into the nitty-gritty of her characters' minds. The way she unravels the plot, layer by layer, is like watching a really good thriller movie.

What stands out about this book is how it's not just about the mystery. It’s also about dealing with the past, family dynamics, and the way our memories shape us. The story dives deep into these themes, making you really think about the nature of truth and forgiveness.

The pacing keeps you on your toes. Just when you think you've got it figured out, Crane throws in a curveball that changes everything. It keeps the suspense high and the pages (or in this case, the audio) turning.

In a nutshell, "A Slow Ruin" is a gripping, thought-provoking listen. It’s perfect for those times when you want a story that’s deep, dark, and full of twists. If you’re into psychological thrillers that make you question everything, this audiobook is right up your alley. It’s like diving into a mystery where every piece of the puzzle is more intriguing than the last.

It took me a little bit to get interested in this story, but once it did, I took off and never looked back! I think some of the trouble in the beginning was the back and forth between the past and the present story and trying to keep up with the many different characters throughout both sections!

This was definitely an interesting twist on a story that I feel like was well-written and quite in depth. This was my first Pamela Crane book but it certainly won't be my last, as I really enjoyed her sense of writing and the characters.

There were a few sections that I had to go back and listen to again just to make sure I didn't miss something, but low and behold, it would come back later to surprise me! I think that's what I really enjoyed the most about this book is the fact that you never really knew what was going to happen, and just when you think you forgot about something, it popped back up leaving you guessing and surprised! In my opinion, these are all of the best things that make up a mystery/thriller book!

A Slow Ruin was narrated by a cast of narrators consisting of Angie Kane, Caitlin Cavannaugh, Lesa Lockford, and Carolina Hoyos. I'm not sure which one narrated Felicity's character, and for the most part it was fine, but there were portions throughout that seems nasally and whiney, but only through a few small portions!

Overall, this book was full of ups and downs, twists and turns, and surprising outcomes that you'll never see coming!

I would like to thank Pamela Crane, Dreamscape Media, and Netgalley for providing me a copy of A Slow Ruin, which allowed me to contribute this honest and unbiased review!

This one wasn't bad, it wasn't amazing either. I felt like it could've been shorter and that it was a bit repetitive, but it was still a good read!

Thank you to Dreamscape media and NetGallery for an ARC audiobook in exchange for my honest review. It took me a long time to get into this book it could have been called slow burn versus slow ruin. The ending really left a lot to be desired. Without spoiling anything this book is so unrealistically cringy. I finished it finally even though if it hadn’t been an ARC awaiting my review I would have DNFed it super confusing and too long. I do love the pink cover much more than the alternate cover.

Such a clever story! J didn’t anticipate the ending! I liked the different POV and enjoyed the characters. The 1910 didn’t really add to the story tho. But still a great listen! Enjoyed the narrator

This is a twisty, complicated domestic thriller spanning almost 100 years. It took me forever to finally get around to finishing this - I started it multiple times and had a hard time getting into it - I think because I found the story so confusing, especially in the beginning. Once I finally gave it a fair chance and the characters were established in my head - I wanted to keep going to find out what was going on. The twists and turns are plentiful and this would make a fantastic group or buddy read to have someone to discuss theories with or hash out some of the complications / twists. I think I enjoyed it? But even when I got to the end I initially wasn't sure what exactly I had just read - I had to go back to the beginning and re-listen to the prologue and then re-listen to the ending to be sure I had it right. And even then I still had questions. I prefer a "cleaner" ending. I listened to the audiobook version - it's possible the physical book would have worked out better for me, making it easier to bookmark important pages and flip back and forth to clarify things. The narrator was fine, but I do think, for me, the complicated plot lends itself better to a physical book or even an e-book. If you like twisty thrillers, I think you'll like this one. It's a bit slow for some of the connections to start to come together in the beginning, but stick with it. 3.5 stars.

4.5
This book was fantastic. It’s one of those books that you really get a good grasp of just how good it truly is when you turn that last page.
This book takes place over multiple years, the earliest being 1910. It starts with the story of women’s rights activist Alvery Fields. She vanishes one night from her home leaving behind both her husband and her newborn baby. The case is never solved.
Forward to April 2021, the anniversary of the disappearance of her great-great grandmother, her namesake Vera Portman vanishes in a very similar way.
Six months later the police recover a girl’s body from the river. The family all wait in anticipation and horror to find out if it’s Vera or not. As they wait, Felicity is hoping with all she has that her teenage daughter is still alive. Although the odds are stacked against her, she knows a mother feels these things down deep into her bones.
I think I’m going to stop there. I really want to keep going and tell you more about this story but I don’t really think that you’d appreciate that in the long run. I went in knowing very little and completely enjoyed the book.
If you like thrillers that span quite a bit of time, that keep you interested, and that have a fantastic ending, this may just be for you.

The synopsis looked really interesting. Alvera Fields, a women’s rights activist, vanished leaving behind her husband and baby in 1910. Her great granddaughter, Vera Portman, also goes missing on the same day years later. I was excited to dive in but the book fell flat to me. Nothing about the book was interesting. The story was convoluted with an excessive amount of filter details. It also had so many different POVs and storylines that the author tried to piece together seamlessly but it did not work. I listened to the audiobook and I was not impressed with any of the narrators either. The book was a letdown for me.

Thank you to NetGallery and to DreamScape Audio for giving me a copy for my honest review.

I am sad that it took me so long to get around to this listen, because I LOVED IT! A great story with great narration that sucked me right in once I started listening!

This was an excellent book! Very twisty and it keeps your interest. I liked the Authors reading style.

I typically love thrillers: this wasn’t it. Moved wayyyy too slow and left me wanting more from each of the characters. Sad to say I DNF’ed at the 35% mark.

In 1910, a women's rights activist disappears. 111 years later, on the exact same day, her great great granddaughter, Vera, disappears.

Her mom, Felicity has been hiding something from Vera, and assumes she found out and she ran away. It's been six months with no word from her. At the center of the mystery is Marin, Vera's aunt and the last person to see her alive.

Told in alternating perspectives of Felicity and Marin, you learn about all of the secrets and betrayels. There are a few surprises. I'll call them major twists, both shocking and one of them was expertly crafted.

Superbly done on audio.

A Slow Ruin was my first book by Pamela Crane. Though it is a thriller, the title is not misleading, because it moves rather slowly, which prevented me from feeling really gripped by the story. That being said, it was creative and there were a few twists and turns I didn't see coming.

I have mixed emotions about this book. Part of me truly enjoyed it, while the other part was irritated. I liked the idea of connecting the disappearance of the suffragette with the disappearance of the daughter, but I felt like that parallel wasn't quite complete. I also felt like some of the big reveals were obvious. Especially when it came to Felicity's big crime. I also had a hard time liking many of the characters. Felicity's whininess drove me nuts. I understand that she was struggling with the loss of her daughter, but her helplessness irritated me.

There were also a lot of different perspectives. There were the two sister-in-laws Marin and Felicity, but there was also an unknown person who wasn't revealed until the end, the suffragette, the daughter, and the husbands. Usually, I do enjoy seeing through the eyes of multiple different people, but I felt like the beginning and the end of this book gave me a bad case of whiplash. There were too many switches, and some of the perspectives didn't make any sense until the very end of the book.

Overall, I felt like this was almost a fantastic book. It feels like the author was reaching for it and would have been there with a few tweaks. I get her underlying goal here and I think it is a wonderful idea, she just didn't quite make it through to the book's full potential.

This is twisty and emotional with several red herrings. First, women’s rights activist Alvera Fields mysteriously vanishes from her home one night—there is NO way she’d have left her husband, let alone her newborn baby.

Then her namesake, great-great-granddaughter Vera Portman vanishes similarly. Her mother rabidly hopes that the body they find six months later is not Vera. The family is very wealthy, but it doesn’t appear to have been a matter of money.

When a journal is found written by Alvera, Felicity devours it’s contents hoping for some hint as to what might have happened to her daughter. SOOO much going on, family secrets, lies, deception, and one who might know, Marin, Felicity’s sister-in-law. The journal reveals much more than anyone could have expected.

I was glad to have the audiobook to help with the many characters. A family dynamic run amok with the circumstances. Is the mother over the top? This IS her daughter after all…isn’t it?

I struggled with it, at times too much detail, minutia, slowing the pace, multiple threads. And the surprise in the conclusion, although at this point, was it really a surprise? It is a slow burn mystery, a tad too slow to keep my engagement at an edge of chair level.3.5 stars

In 1910, women's suffrage activist Alvera Fields goes missing one night, leaving her husband and baby at home. The case goes unsolved, and her husband was the primary suspect. The case was covered extensively in the local newspaper.

In April 2021, on the anniversary of her great-great-grandmother's disappearance, Alvera's namesake Vera Portman disappears from her family home. After 6 months of not hearing from her daughter, Vera's mother Felicity holds out hope that her daughter will be found alive. The family receives notice that a female's body has been found, and they wait in anxious anticipation to find out if it is Vera.

Felicity is determined to find out what happened to her daughter, and she suspects her sister-in-law, Marin knows something more, as she was the last person to see Vera alive. Told in alternating narration, readers will uncover the truth alongside Felicity and Marin, all the while noticing the uncanny parallels to Alvera's disappearance, over a century earlier.

A slow burn for sure, I really enjoyed this book. A lot of secrets are revealed throughout. The characters are well-developed, realistically flawed, and likeable. Everyone in this family has at least one secret that they are hoping to hide, that Vera's disappearance threatens to bring to the surface. A well written, and moving book. Thank you to the author, NetGalley, and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this title.

The premise sounded good: a teenaged descendant of a suffragette who disappeared 100 years earlier disappears on the 100th anniversary of the original disappearance. What could cause such a remarkable coincidence? A supernatural occurrence would have made more sense than the illogical, hard-twisting, repetitive nonsense that is patched together to bring this novel to its eventual, stumbling conclusion.

I hate to give bad reviews. A three is about the lowest review I give (unless someone is racist, sexist or otherwise ignorant and not ashamed to express it). But this novel is really awful. Late-revealed familial relationships where we hadn't realized they existed, babies found by the side of the road, sudden inheritances changing people's fortunes, truly terrible dialogue, and repetitive worrying and hand-wringing that dragged scenes out to their maximum length, made this book a chore to complete. Not for me.

Thanks to Netgalley and Dreamscape Media for giving me a free audiobook in exchange for my honest review. This is one of the few that I only finished because I felt obligated to review it.

A Slow Ruin was my first read from Pamela Crane but she's been on my list to check out for a while. She has a unique writing style that took me a bit to get used to. She does use dual timelines which I normally love, but this audiobook had me a bit confused as it jumps between the two timelines as well as jumping back and forth in the timeline of the current story which really confused me for a bit when I was trying to get the sequence of events right in my head. As the mystery and family secrets are slowly revealed, this became more interesting to me but was a bit of a letdown because I honestly expected a bigger, more shocking reveal when it finally came. I found every single one of the characters incredibly frustrating and naïve but I still enjoyed watching them flounder around each other trying to keep their secrets hidden from each other. Overall, I thought this was interesting and I enjoyed it but it was lacking in intensity in the overall storyline.


Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A story that follows the news from April 1910, when women’s rights activist Alvera Fields mysteriously vanishes from her home one night, leaving her newborn baby and husband behind, the case never solved and April 2021, when Vera Portman vanishes in an eerily similar manner.

Welcome to the lives of Felicity Portman and her husband, Oliver, and Felicity’s sister-in-law, Marin. In this trio, their are lies and secrets that each is keeping from one another, all while they search for Vera. This book had me hooked and I didn't see any of the twists coming. As I got closer to the end and more secrets came to light I thought I had it all figured out, but I was wrong. I loved every second of this book!! And the voices seemed to fit their characters, too.

I'd like to say a huge thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

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Thank you NetGalley and Pamela Crane. This story shook me and left me guessing at every turn. It really is a story about the sins of the father per se. I thought the narrator was fantastic and conveyed so much emotion and energy. I loved the story.