A devoted wife, a loving husband and a chilling murder that no one saw coming.Things that make me scared: When Charlie cries. Hospitals and lakes. When Ian drinks vodka in the basement. ISIS. When Ian gets angry… That something is really, really wrong with me.Maddie and Ian’s love story began with a chance encounter at a party overseas; he was serving in the British army and she was a travel … in the British army and she was a travel writer visiting her best friend, Jo. Now almost two decades later, married with a beautiful son, Charlie, they are living the perfect suburban life in Middle America. But when a camping accident leaves Maddie badly scarred, she begins attending writing therapy, where she gradually reveals her fears about Ian’s PTSD; her concerns for the safety of their young son; and the couple’s tangled and tumultuous past with Jo.
From the Balkans to England, Iraq to Manhattan, and finally to an ordinary family home in Kansas, sixteen years of love and fear, adventure and suspicion culminate in The Day of the Killing, when a frantic 911 call summons the police to the scene of a shocking crime.
Don’t miss Annie Ward’s explosive new novel, The Lying Club, a story of revenge, murder and shocking secrets!
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A very enjoyable read. I’d highly recommend.
Beautiful Bad is a psychological thriller that got me excited and very interested at first, but about 40% of the way through I started to lose my fascination with the story.
It felt like something just wasn’t there that it needed to give the extra oomph I was looking for. I also found the back and forth, scrambled up chapters / timeline difficult to follow. One chapter was 2007, the next 2013, and the next 2001 (I provided any dates not specific ones just to give an example).
I also felt like the friendship between the two main female characters wasn’t as deep or strong as it was made out to be which sometimes made me feel like what I was reading was faked. Maybe that’s what I felt was missing, not sure.
Yes, I will read another book by this author and because not every book is for every person, I’d recommend you try it for yourself instead of deciding from my review.
3.25 stars and thanks to Netgalley, the author and publisher for an ARC. My thoughts in this review are my own and freely given.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2477887347
OK thriller.
I loved everything about this book until the end. Maddie is the protagonist in this novel. It seems completely unbelievable to expect the reader to accept that the person whose head we have been inside for some 20 years, is a different person than the one she presents through her thoughts and actions. It’s as if she knows she is thinking out loud for a readership and is not a real person. It felt like a literary ploy that cheapened the whole book for me. No Gone Girl that’s for sure.
Beautiful Bad has an interesting premise, and it starts with a 911 call that certainly grabs the attention of the reader. Unfortunately, the story quickly spiraled downward from there, at least for me. Part of that lays in the many tools used here that have been done and done again. We have the unreliable narrator, and we’re spoon fed the back stories of the characters as the timeline jumps from distant past to more recent past and back again with tidbits of the day the 911 call is placed. The story is quite wordy, much more so than necessary. For me, there were whole chunks of story in the middle that could easily have been left out without hurting the book as a whole. Those chunks made for a lot of lagtime that I could’ve done without. I also had some problems with the relationships between the characters in that I just didn’t buy them. Nothing of real substance happens between Maddie and Ian in the beginning to warrant traveling halfway round the world after years have passed, and the friendship between Maddie and Jo seems pretty shallow for most of the book. I didn’t see anything between these women to believe the amount of trust they have later in the story. There are some interesting twists in the end, but most are too predictable, and the one really good one at the very end just wasn’t enough to save this for me. I once heard that no two people read the same book, and I realize that I’m in the minority on this book, so take it for what it’s worth. For me, the story just didn’t live up to its potential.
Maddie and Joanna had been friends since they met in Spain.
What happened, though?
Joanna and Maddie have lost touch, Maddie married Ian, and now we come upon a 911 call as the first page of BEAUTIFUL BAD opens.
We follow from when Maddie meets Ian overseas and when Ian and Maddie are married.
The chapters are labeled in years as well as weeks before the 911 call.
As you read, subtle hints were given to the underlying tension and the situations that caused everything to fall apart and turn into murder.
Joanna seemed pretty volatile, jealous, and dangerous.
Ian seemed to have some problems with women, had secrets, and seemed dangerous.
Fiona seemed as if she could fly off the handle for any reason. She was also jealous of Ian.
Maddie seemed to be the weak character and the most gullible, or was she?
So many characters to wonder who made the 911 call and who the attacker was.
The BEFORE-the-day-of-the-killing chapters weren’t that interesting to me even though they were the lead up to everything.
There are some frightening situations throughout the book including details of the 911 scene, bizarre happenings, and abuse.
If you enjoy a many-chapter wait for the final scene, BEAUTIFUL BAD will be a book you will enjoy. The ending did turn out to be a surprise.
BEAUTIFUL BAD was good, but I wasn’t wanting to rush back to it. 3.5/5
This book was given to me as an ARC by the publisher via BookishFirst in exchange for an honest review.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publiser for this ARC. 3.5 star This page turner starts out with the detective coming in on a crime scene with a big pool of blood. A family lives at this beautiful house, what could have happened?
I really enjoyed the details of Bulgaria and Macedonia and threw out the story. It kept me engaged the whole time and wondering what every single character was up to.
This is a hard book to review. I had a love/hate relationship with this book from the beginning. I loved it when I first started reading it but then it went downhill from there for me. There were too many POVs and too much switching back and forth in time and place. I would love it in parts and then parts of it did not hold my interest at all. The characters were all pretty much unlikable and most of them were weird except for Detective Diane Varga. Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Beautiful Bad by author Annie Ward is a suspense story with twists and three of the characters have hidden motives for their own personal reasons. Maddie is a travel writer and has been in Europe as she researches for her articles and features. She has a best friend Joanna, who is working with relief efforts in the war-torn Balkans to send supplies to women and children. During one of Maddie’s visits to Jo, she meets Ian who is a bodyguard serving in different war zones as protection for contractors or business interests in those areas. They are attracted to each other and romance blossoms. Jo’s attitude toward Maddie changes and there is a fierce tension between the friends. Maddie comes back to the US and Ian proposes marriage to her while they are visiting her parent’s farm in Kansas. They have a beautiful son they both adore, Charlie. As time progresses, the stresses of Ian’s job, the weeks away from home, and the contact he has with an ex-girlfriend take a toll on the marriage. During a camping trip, Maddie is injured severely during a fall. Was it accidental or was it an act of violence against Maddie by Ian?
The story is good, and there is an element of suspense, but the way the segments of the story are divided up in the timeline can be a distraction rather than a pattern for interest. (Spoiler Alert) I think the revel of Ian’s thoughts in the final chapters after he has been killed, is written out of sequence, maybe, I don’t know but something about that explanation seemed a bit out of character for the self-absorbed and challenging Ian we have been reading about previously in the book.
Maddie, Jo, and Ian are all flawed people with trust issues and their one agendas.
Publication Date March 19, 2019
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.