What Doesn't Kill Her: A Novel

Carla Norton

Jun 2015 · Macmillan + ORM

About this ebook

Reeve LeClaire is a college student, dammit, not Daryl Wayne Flint's victim. Not anymore-not when Reeve is finally recovering a life of her own after four years of captivity.

Flint is safely locked up in Olshaker Psychiatric Hospital, where he belongs. He is walking the grounds of the forensic unit, performing his strange but apparently harmless rituals. It seems that he is still suffering the effects of the head injury he suffered in the car crash that freed Reeve seven years ago. Post-concussive syndrome, they call it.

For all that Flint seems like a model patient, he has long been planning his next move. When the moment arrives, he gets clean away from the hospital before the alarm even sounds. And Reeve is shocked out of her new life by her worst nightmare: Her kidnapper has escaped. Less than 24 hours later, Flint kills someone from his past--and Reeve's blocked memories jolt back into consciousness. As much as she would like to forget him, she knows this criminal better than anyone else. When Flint evades capture, baffling authorities and leaving a bloody trail from the psychiatric lock-up to the forests of Washington state, Reeve suddenly realizes that she is the only one who can stop him.

Reeve is an irresistibly brave and believable heroine in Carla Norton's heart-stopping new thriller, What Doesn't Kill Her, about a young woman who learns to fight back.

Ratings and reviews

3.5 stars What Doesn't Kill Her is the second book in Carla Norton's Reeve LeClaire series. Although it can stand alone, I am one of those obsessive-compulsive readers who just has to read a series in order, so I picked up Edge of Normal first. My decision to do so both helped and harmed my opinion of What Doesn't Kill Her. On the positive side, Norton's writing has become more polished, making this one of the rare series in which the second book is stronger than the first. On the negative side, What Doesn't Kill Her exacerbated the major flaw with Edge of Normal: protagonist Reeve LeClaire is a two-dimensional character whose only interesting feature is that she survived four years of captivity at the hands of a sexual sadist. This experience defines her, which may well be an accurate portrayal of the real victims of such abuse; however, a fictional character needs more to retain my interest, particularly across multiple books. As Dr. Ezra Lerner, Reeve's psychiatrist, observes at the end of Edge of Normal, Reeve's experience makes her uniquely well-suited to help other survivors, but What Doesn't Kill Her simply dumps her back into her own trauma. My sense is that Norton has created, and is using, the Reeve LeClaire series as a sort of public service announcement directed at readers who may themselves be the victims of sexual violence, a sense heightened by Norton's decision to close each book with an express exhortation that, "[i]f you or someone you know needs help, please act as quickly as possible" by calling 911 or one of the other organizations she helpfully lists. I would never tell a real victim to "move on," but if this series wants to survive, that's what Reeve needs to do. I received a free copy of What Doesn't Kill Her through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Excellent conclusion to On The Edge of Normal

About the author

CARLA NORTONis the author of The Edge of Normal, a finalist for an ITW Thriller Award for Best First Novel, coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestseller Perfect Victim, which the FBI put on its Behavioral Sciences Unit reading list, and author of What Doesn't Kill Her, which was the winner of the 2016 Nancy Pearl Award and the President's Book Award Gold Medal. She has twice served as a judge for the Edgar Awards. She lives in California and Florida.