Every Step She Takes by K.L. Armstrong #AudioBookReview

Sometimes there’s no use running from your past. . . .

Genevieve has secrets that no one knows. In Rome she can be whoever she wants to be. Her neighbours aren’t nosy; her Italian is passable; the shopkeepers and restaurant owners now see her as a local, and they let her be. It’s exactly what she wants.

One morning, after getting groceries, she returns to her 500-year-old Trastevere apartment. She climbs to the very top of the staircase, the stairs narrowing the higher she goes. When she gets to her door, she puts down her bags and pushes the key into the lock . . .

. . . and the door swings open.

It’s unlocked. Sometimes she doesn’t lock it because break-ins aren’t common in Rome. But Genevieve knows she locked the door behind her this morning. She has no doubt.

She should leave, call the police. What if someone is in her apartment, waiting for her? But she doesn’t.

The apartment is empty, and exactly as she left it, perfectly tidy and not a thing out of place . . . except for the small box on her kitchen table. A box that definitely wasn’t there this morning. A box postmarked from the US. A box that is addressed to “Lucy Callahan.”

A name that she hasn’t used in ten years.

I’m giving an audiobook a new try and the results are… well somewhere in the middle ground. After finishing Every Step She Takes I realise that the blurb is more of a teaser but doesn’t really say what the book is about. There is no big mystery who sent the box, the mystery lies in what happens after sender and receiver meet and let’s just say the encounter won’t go exactly as planned.

Goodreads announces Every Step She Takes to be edge-of-your-seat riveting but frankly, it was hard to get into it at first. The build up was slow and at the pivotal moment where the story kicks off, I knew I was headed for a mystery/drama more than a thriller. Lucy/Genevieve Callahan is the character who it’s all about. In a past plotline she shares how, aged 18, she starts a summer job babysitting the two children of a celebrity couple (movie star Colt Gordon and his wife and violinist Isabella Morales) and how it went so wrong one day that she ended up as a musical teacher in Italy, keeping her head down and trying not to be recognized. In the present day she finally has a chance to set the record straight and tell what happened, or didn’t happen, on one fateful night. I thought it would be something major, something worth moving several countries for but it was not as excessive as I presumed. I know the media is not to be underestimated and they can break people but still, I felt it was a little overplayed. Anyway, Lucy has learned from her past experience with the media so she’s not taking any chances this time and decides to take the matter in her own hands and find out who really should be in the media’s eye now instead.

One of the things I liked in this novel was the fact that Lucy (aka llamagirl) received help from someone called PC Tracy via text messages. She and I had the same idea who this PC Tracy was but we were both wrong and it was one of the best twists in the novel. The final chapters also made me happy I persevered with most of the action and revelations revealed in the last part of the novel.

Finally, I don’t want to end this without telling that I really had fun listening to the narrator’s Italian accent for Isabella Morales and Lucy’s lover Marco, she did this brilliantly and I wanted them to talk as much as possible.

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