Am on a Freida McFadden trip !! This is her 5th novel that I have finished reading. By far, this is the best one.
The Inmate – Plot
Brooke is a practitioner nurse and gets a job in a maximum security penitentiary. She is very apprehensive as she joins work there. It’s not only a prison for hardened criminals, but someone that she helped put away is also locked up there.
We get to know that Brooke and her 10 year old son have recently shifted back to her hometown – the place that she grew up in. Her parents have tragically died in a car accident and left her their house.
She bumps into her closest friend Tim at the school when she goes to drop her son. She lies to him about Josh’s age, but is thrilled to re-meet him. It appears as though he had remained unmarried.
Slowly Tim and Brooke date each other and she feels very happy about this. Till she doesn’t ! At the prison, Shane Nelson is the inmate that Brooke helped put away. He was her high school sweetheart who tried to kill her. That’s the first twist … three couples (all high school kids) go to Shane’s house to have a night out and three of them die. Brooke escapes and gives testimony against Shane. He gets life imprisonment.
Brooke gets to meet Shane within a couple of days of her starting work at the prison. He is beaten up by other inmates. He keeps insisting on his innocence. Brooke is also not totally clear about who tried to choke her – but she remembers the smell of Shane’s aftershave and that’s how she concludes it was him.
Anyway, Josh becomes very fond of Tim and Brooke believes that they have a future together. Just then, she discovers the body of a young woman who was missing for a week, in Tim’s wine cellar. The police strangely reach Tim’s house and arrest him for the murder of Kelli. Brooke recants her testimony and Shane is a free man.
Shane comes to stay with Brooke till he gets back on his feet … and Josh is not too happy about it. He doesn’t like Shane as much as he liked Tim. In a sudden twist, Shane wants to go back to his old farmhouse where the three other friends had been killed and Brooke was nearly killed too. Once there, Brooke relives that night and realises that it was indeed Shane who tried to kill her that day. In the meantime Shane has taken Josh out into the woods to build a snowman….
The whole plot comes out in the open quickly ….. Shane dies accidentally till you reach the last two pages. Tim is not the murderer so he gets out of prison. Life goes back to normal for Brooke and she and Tim think of getting together. The last two pages make you wonder if their life will ever be normal as you, the reader figures out who really killed Shane.
A brilliantly written murder mystery. Definitely recommend. My rating 5/5. If Kindle Unlimited has more of Freida McFadden’s books am getting them.
Well-written summary and sure raises curiosity and tension. tempts me to read.
Thanks Anu 🤗