3.5 stars - Thank you to NetGalley & the publishers for an ARC copy of The Perfect Boyfriend! This was my second audio book and it did not disappoint. I loved the narration, they did a fantastic job of depicting the tone (digust, dislike, panic, etc.). I did find the description of the book should have had a little bit more context (like Kristie was married, was very pregnant, etc.). I was thrown off a little during the first chapter or two because of that. The book had a few twists that I didn't see coming, and a few that I did. Overall I enjoyed the book and gave it a 3.5 stars.

I’m sure you can imagine the scene. It was the morning of Sunday, 22nd December and there were presents that needed to be wrapped. But I’d started reading The Perfect Boyfriend, the latest book by the amazing S E Lynes, the evening before and I wanted nothing more than to sit on the sofa with a mug of tea and devour some more of it.

Obviously, there was only one thing to be done. Which meant that, by the time I looked up from my kindle, I was two-thirds of the way through the book and it was getting really exciting. But there was only another hour of daylight left, and the dog wanted a walk …

It’s no criticism whatsoever of the book, or the author that even The Perfect Boyfriend wasn’t a match for the charms of a Labrador, so a walk was done, after which I forced myself to decide that the wrapping could wait no longer. So after a couple of hours of swearing at sellotape whilst trying – and failing miserably – to stop thinking about the book, I’ve now decided that I hate wrapping presents and will be quite happy to never receive a gift again if it means that I never have to wrap another one for as long as I live. Obviously, this is all Susie Lynes’ fault.

Eventually, I finished this loathsome task and was able to pick my kindle up again. But then came my second problem. During the day, the mucus that had been stuck to my vocal chords and given me laryngitis for over a week had finally begun to come loose. This had caused me to cough almost continuously and, whilst I promise not to get too graphic, let me tell you something. It doesn’t matter how good the book is, it’s impossible to give it the concentration it really deserves if you’re having to put it down every minute or so to bring something green and unpleasant up from the back of your throat.

So it says a lot that The Perfect Boyfriend was still – effortlessly – able to hold my attention.

In some of her recent novels, Susie has taken a little bit of a risk with her introductions – writing slow-burners that you have to allow to gently caress you in until, before you’ve really noticed, you’re fully gripped – and also her main characters, creating people that you really have to understand fully for the books to really work. This time though, with the character of Kirsty, she’s played it safe. The prologue is one hell of a hook that has you fearing the worst even before the main part of the book has begun, and Kirsty … well. How lovely a woman can you create? Let’s make her a midwife, responsible for bringing new life safely into the world. Let’s have her performing an exemplary emergency birth, which only serves to make the reader every bit as grateful to her as the fictional mother is. When she’s not at work, let’s have her care for her elderly neighbour and yes, a former patient too. Oh, and just for good measure, let’s make her heavily pregnant … I tell you, if you dislike this lady then you must be evil.

Has Susie, in fact, played it a little too safe? Well, maybe. I didn’t care, though, because it worked for me. Not only did it have me cheering Kirsty on at every decision she made and every action she took – even though some of them were clearly wrong, I still wanted her to be right – but it also served as a stark contrast to the character of Hughie. In one sense, she and he are good and evil personified and yet, it’s nowhere near as simple as that. The book also serves as a wonderful illustration of just how easy it is to see what’s presented to us, or to accept what we choose to see without a second thought. But just how easy is it for someone to take advantage of this, particularly if that someone is a psychopath with no sense of empathy, humility, shame, or guilt, only entitlement … ?

I thought that there could only be one way that the book could end, and in one sense I was sort of right. But again, this didn’t matter because Susie still manages to throw in a couple of masterful twists. One of which, in particular, I thought was brilliant. Suffice to say that the message given throughout the book is personified yet again. We assume something about a secondary character, only for this to be revealed as untrue. And only then do we realise what we haven’t actually been told, and see the gaps that we’ve chosen to fill in our own imaginations … Yes, there are a couple of instances when in real life, the truth would probably have come to light earlier but what the heck, it’s still very cleverly done. And I haven’t even mentioned the setting, which also works perfectly by making Aberdeen, in winter, a character in its own right.

My only real niggle with this book is its title. Perhaps, in an early draft, the boyfriend in question did appear perfect at first but in this version, he’s anything but perfect from the very start. I’ve no idea what it should be called instead, but I still don’t think ‘The Perfect Boyfriend’ really works.

Let’s end though on something more positive. The author’s note. Susie invites me, as a reader of hers for the fourteenth time, to pour myself a large drink and also to search for a “Valentina-related Easter egg” that I seem to have missed. I can only apologise and say: blame the lurgy brain for that.

A large drink and a re-read, though? Thank you, I don’t mind if I do.

And on that note, I’ll sign off and say: merry Christmas to you all.

My thanks to Bookouture and Netgalley for the digital ARC of this book, which is due to be published in the UK on 6th January 2025. I have reviewed it voluntarily and honestly, and will post my review on Goodreads, Amazon and my social media pages.

A solid thriller!

A great twisted ride, very fast paced, I'm glad the story wasn't dragging on and on.

I honestly did not see it coming.

The only thing that gave me a bit of an ick was the excessive Scottish slang.

The Perfect Boyfriend by S.E. Lynes was a 3-star read for me. While I read it in one day, the plot seemed manic between Kristy and Hughie. The title as well did not make sense to me as Hughie was far from perfect and Kristy flashes back to her last night with him while in HS. Not my favorite, but still worth a read, especially for fans of S.E. Lynes. Thanks to NetGalley and Bookouture for the ARC in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own. Publication Date: January 06, 2025

Probably not the best book by this author but kept me interested to the very end. Well written although it did feel a little slow at times. Twists a plenty at the end so make sure you read to the very last page

This book is one wild thriller that had me on the edge of my seat. The ending! Holy cow! Wasn’t expecting that at all or any of what led to the ending. Loved the characters too! Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this remarkable book in exchange for my honest review. To be published January 2025. Can’t wait for more books by S. E. Lynes.

I received this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Kristy is so frustrating to read, I wanted to reach within the pages and shake her after "watching" her make one wrong decision after another. Even tho hindsight is 20- 20, but her decisions were irrational and wreckless. Her inner dialogues in the book tend to be repetitive and came off like mad ramblings.

Wow, wow, wow!!!!!!! Yet another fantastic story by this author, she never disappoints. Full of twists and turns and nail biting until the very end. Huge 5 stars.

This is another great read from S.E Lynes told in both past and present Points Of Views of the main characters Kirsty and Hughie.
Boy, did I dislike Hughie😡
Don't let the title fool you. This is no romantic read. It's a cleverly written psychological thriller.
The twists at the end were unexpected. I actually thought I'd misread things they threw me totally.
Loved the Easter Egg reference to one of the authors' earlier books.
A RECOMMENDED Read.
Thanks to Netgalley and Bookouture for the ARC.

Kirsty is at work, heavily pregnant, when she thinks she sees an ex-boyfriend from her teenage years. This brings back memories of how he cruelly dumped her after A levels and she never saw him again. She calls out his name and he ignores her, because it turns out he is someone else, but she doesn’t believe him and starts to work on the mystery of who he is and why people connected with her start to disappear in mysterious ways.
This is an interesting book with lots of twists and turns as it reaches its exciting conclusion. I think one either feel sympathy for, or irritated by Kirsty. Regardless, she is a good person who is kind to everyone she meets and doesn’t deserve to have met the cruel Hughie. I do like the way in which everything is explained by the end of the story.

OMG! What have I just read! This book is amazing!!! I loved the storyline, I loved the characters, the good ones & the bad ones. There's so many twists and turns, this book will have you staying up reading well into the night. I read this in one sitting. Definitely 5 stars from me ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I really enjoy this author’s books and The Perfect Boyfriend definitely hit the mark. It’s a fast paced psychological thriller that will have you hooked from the start. The plot moves at pace and you are completely immersed and kept enthralled until the end. Thank you to NetGalley, Bookouture and the author for the chance to review.

I love a thriller that I do not see the twist coming at all!!

This was not on the edge of your seat thriller the entire time. We mostly have Kristy who is an amateur sleuth who also feels like a unreliable narrator because she is 8 months pregnant and no one believes.

I don’t know what it was about this book. It might have been the authors writing but I was engaged with the storyline the whole time. I did not understand why the chapters started out like it was transcripts because that was never explained.

The twist at the end!!!! My jaw was on the literal floor! Well I should say twists because when one started they just kept going!! That turned this book from a 3⭐️ to a 4⭐️

Genre: Thriller
APK: Ebook
Pages: 376
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Series or Standalone: Stand-alone

Thank you Bookoture for sending me a copy of The Perfect Boyfriend for an honest review. 💜

I was hooked right from the very start and couldn't put it down, reading it in one sitting. Absolutely fantastic book full of tension and had me completely gripped

This was totally enjoyable and left me gobsmacked. This writing is so easy to sink into. Fantastic characters that kept the story clipping along way past my bedtime. Like a roller coaster ride that left me no idea who to trust. Don’t let this one pass you by. Highly recommend.

Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.

It’s probably slightly unfair of me to be reviewing this book since I’m not the biggest thriller reader. And when I do fancy a thriller it tends to be in slightly aberrant situations—like being on a long journey—where capacity to engage me is the only thing I’m seeking from my entertainment.

To give The Perfect Boyfriend credit, it did indeed engage me, even if it didn’t completely blow my mind, and I suspect will not linger in it. Then again, my mind is basically Swiss cheese so very little lingers in it.

The premise here is that the heroine, Kirsty, is working as a midwife up in somewhere Scotlandy—I think I want to say Aberdeen. She’s also heavily pregnant, and about to go on parental leave, when she suddenly sees a former ex-boyfriend, apparently working as an anaesthesiologist at the same hospital. This particular boyfriend left her in a notably unpleasant way, vanishing without a trace after, and when she attempts to talk to him in the hospital, he acts as though he doesn’t know her.

Cue the usual thriller type happenings, which I won’t go into detail on, because it would spoil literally the entire thing. But it definitely has all the elements you want from this sort of book: mysteries, revelations and twists oh my, a handful of murders, a narrator presumed unreliable by those around her, messing around with timelines, kidnappings, peril and the POV of the villain interspersed with those of the heroine/narrator.

I think my strongest impression of this book was that it … how can I put this. It read the assignment. It is a thoughtful, brisky written, very well-constructed thriller that hits all the right notes at exactly the right times. And sometimes that’s kind of all you need?

Can I quibble? I mean, yeah. I’m me. Of course I can. I honestly found the heroine a bit of a non-person: she’s just a nice woman, with a nice life, from a nice background, who is nice to people. As a certified feral basket, by about the midway point I was starting to maybe think the villain was broadly had a point in his frustration with her. Also, while it’s clear the villain is a horrible person who does horrible things, at least he’s got more going on than being nice—which ended up making his sections read as disproportionately charismatic. And there’s always going to be part of me that’s going to relate to people from fucked up backgrounds who do fucked up things for fucked up reasons (although I definitely draw the line at fraud, abuse and murder). I think what also makes the villain complicated, especially compared to Kirsty Who Is Nice, is that his ambitions are fairly modest? He wants to escape his deprived and abusive background and, err, be an anaesthesiologist? At which—despite his lack of formal qualifications (sorry, mild spoiler there)—he seems to be genuinely talented, and causing no harm? I realise that we’d all prefer our medical practitioners to be qualified and fully vetted before doing their thing, especially given the consequences of doing it wrong are so very dire, but like … it’s not like being qualified magically insulates you ever making a mistake or being bad at your job. And, yes, I get that part of what qualifications are doing when it comes to high stakes professions are serving as a barrier to entry, so someone can’t just walk in off the street and operate on you, but, in abstract terms, between two people performing their jobs in a functionally identical way … what does it matter? I guess I’m just saying that if the villain hadn’t run into Kirsty, he’d probably have just continued his life of mild shitfuckery.

And most of us live lives of mild shitfuckery anyway?

The other plot note that mildly bugged me was that, at one point, Kirsty’s elderly neighbour (Kirsty is nice to her elderly neighbour because, of course, she is) disappears. And she remains disappeared for over a week, with nobody around taking Kirsty’s concerns seriously because, apparently, sometimes old women do be that vanishing way. Across the run of the book, Kirsty does make various attempts to contact the police about the various things that are going, and is disregarded, but … like … why on earth didn’t she just report her neighbour as a missing person (which you can do at any time you believe someone is missing, and will be taken especially seriously if they’re vulnerable, i.e. young, old, in mental distress).? And, yes, okay she’s getting texts from said neighbour, telling her to stay away, but they’re clearly not *from* her neighbour, and she doesn’t believe them—even going so far as to creep around her neighbour’s blatantly empty house.

I know it’s kind of a … limitation of the format. If people behaved wholly rationally at all times in a thriller, it wouldn’t be a thriller it would be a … a …quotidianer? A boringer? I don’t know. And I get that everyone suspends their disbelief in different ways, at different times, in different places, but, for me, I need at least lip service paid to the rudiments of sensible behaviour. Oh, and I also got slightly in my head about the fact that the dual narration is framed as a series of audio-interviews for a documentary. This is another suspension of disbelief thing: obviously I know a book written the way people genuinely talk would be unreadable and that the audio-interview aspect here is essentially equivalent to the letters in an epistolary novel i.e. it’s not meant to be a literal representation of the form, so much a way of conveying a fictional narrative that heightens intimacy and immediacy. But, for me personally, I would have liked a tiny nod, now and again, to the fact that the book-as-written is actually a series of audio-interviews. Because I don’t quite see why you’d employ a device like that and still present the book almost entirely in standard prose. Though I will add, since I’m talking about language, that the book does have a really nice ear for Scottish rhythms and dialect, that I felt was really well-judged, and was lovely to see on the page without it ever feeling cartoonish or overdone.

Finally … and this is … technically a spoiler, though it shouldn’t be a spoiler. Basically, at the very end of the novel, slightly out of nowhere, we learn that the heroine is in a queer relationship. Her partner, the ambiguously-named Dougie, is actually—OHEMGEE—her wife. I guess fair play to the book for playing the pronoun game for the entire duration of the text sufficiently subtlety that I didn’t notice, but also … why is the fact that the heroine is in a long-term relationship with another woman deliberately, I don’t know if withheld is even the right word, presented evasively in that way? Like, was it meant to reflect in some way upon Kirsty’s relationship with the relationship with the villain? He left her so traumatised she turned gay? What? No. Or was it more that the book kind of fucking with the reader, like “ahh, you made a gendered assumption, what does that say about you, ahhhh”. Or is it meant to be the final twist? In which case, also no, because queer people aren’t a twist. We’re just … here? And frankly the only way it can possibly work as a twist or a surprised if the queerness and queer identity play literally zero part in the heroine’s life or thinking up to the point she’s suddenly like AND THE CHARACTER CALLED DOUGIE IS ACTUALLY MY WIIIIIFE. I don’t know. It was all hella weird to me.

Even so, I still enjoyed the book. Based on the other reviews, which are very “omg, blew my mind, amazing twists” I think it would probably appeal to more to a thriller aficionado. But it delivered what I was hoping for, in terms of the quintessential thriller experience, and got me through a long, slightly emotionally tough, journey. For which I’m super grateful.

I think every girl meets someone, usually during their late teens, who they think is "The One". The perfect boyfriend - the one who can do no wrong in their eyes. Then the inevitable split happens, girl is devastated, boy disappears into the ether, and life carries on. This book epitomises this scenario - only this time the boy comes back to his old stomping ground. Or so Kirsty thinks. But she's 8 months pregnant, hormones raging...could she be mistaken? Especially as he denies knowing her.

This book is written in a style that I love: two different points of view, one knowing the answers to everything the other is desperately seeking. Early on it's not clear whether the man working at the hospital where Kirsty is a midwife actually is Hughie, the love of Kirsty's teenage life. Then we gradually hear more from Dr Sefton and all becomes clear.

The majority of the book is taken up with Kirsty's battle to convince her friends, colleagues and family that this guy is not who he appears to be. He's been very clever at building his shiny, new professional life but Kirsty is determined to work out how he's managed to be so convincing. However when her investigations start to have deadly consequences the pressure is on for her to find that vital evidence.

I felt the writing reflected the way Kirsty's mind must have been going round in circles, proving then disproving her ever-more crazy theories. The way her friends and family dismissed her, just putting things down to her raging hormones, had me frustrated let alone her! The tension builds steadily towards the end of the book and I was on the edge of my seat (and screaming at Kirsty not to put herself and her unborn baby at risk) in the final few chapters.

Some of the twists are far more subtle than the main focus of the story, which I found made the whole thing a much more wholesome experience. I personally found this to be a gripping page turner of a book and would definitely recommend it especially to read on a cold, dark winter's evening for added atmosphere.

When you are “fraught, frightened and frustrated” it becomes easier to do things that we wouldn’t usually do. Easier to take risks that might put us in danger; or go against everything that made any kind of logical sense. This is certainly true for Kirsty who is eight months pregnant, having flashbacks from a complicated history with an old boyfriend and is troubled by a neighbours situation.

An added challenge that the author presents is how hard it can be when you believe something is true, only those around you don’t and won’t believe. Often it is this lack of belief that can also assist in pushing people into actions or situations that may end up deadly.

How often do you see what you expect to see, rather than what is there? This is one of the chief things to consider when reading “The perfect boyfriend” as S. E. Lynes winds the story through countless twists and turns and addresses the question of what the boyfriend Kirsty once thought was perfect. With plenty of suspense and a gradual unwinding of the truth, this is sure to keep readers guessing. The story did drag a little bit in places, and at other times it was hard keeping up!

Thanks to Netgalley and Bookouture for the advanced reader copy in exchange for a review. Due to be released on 6th January 2025.

Wow! What a crazy, twisted ride! This thriller is layered with lies, deception, and countless unanswered questions. Did Kirsty’s first boyfriend resurface from the distant past, or is it an ordinary case of mistaken identity? Just when I thought the story was going in one direction, a twist would occur and take the plot down an unexpected path. This thriller is entertaining, suspenseful, and unputdownable. It was a roller coaster ride from start to finish. Thank you, NetGalley and Bookouture for my ARC.

What did I just read????? Holy Moly, S.E. Lynes has taken me on a riveting, wild, and shocking roller coaster of a ride once again! I mean, seriously this book knocked my socks off leaving me with cold feet and my jaw hanging open! This book had me in its clutches from the very beginning and never let go! Whew!

Kirsty is at the hospital where she works as a midwife. She has just delivered a baby and is walking down the hallway when she sees a man who stops her in her tracks! Could it be? Is it him? Is the handsome man walking toward her high school boyfriend (Hughie Reynolds) who vanished all those years ago?????? The man tells her she must be mistaken but she knows it is him! The eyes, it's all in the eyes!! But is she correct???? Everyone in her life from her husband to her friends, believe she is mistaken, perhaps a bit hormonal as she is very pregnant.


Well, well, well, hang on to your hats folks because this book is about to become a wild, fast paced, and thrilling ride. I enjoyed how the book is told through the perspective of both Kirsty and Hughie. I found this to be a nice clever touch! Plus, readers are also given glimpses into the past. S. E. Lynes brilliantly captures the emotions of being a teen experiencing a myriad of emotions. She also captured Kirsty's unwavering drive and determination to get to the truth!

I enjoyed the mystery in this book as well as the mounting tension and sense of unease. I could not stop turning the pages as the twists and turns kept coming! There was one part where my mouth fell open in shock because I did not see that reveal coming at all!!! Total shocker! S.E. Lynes never disappoints!

Gripping, shocking, wonderfully written, and well thought out!