Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I receive a small compensation to help support my blog if you decide to make a purchase through my links at no cost to you.
I am so grateful to Minotaur Books for sending me an advance copy of this book to review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
I am going to recommend that you skip the full synopsis for this book. I will be including one in my review, but you will enjoy this book more if you go in blind.
Also, I normally don’t do this, but there are spoilers in my review because I wanted to discuss the ending. I have a warning so you can skip them! If you have read the book, I would love to discuss my spoiler-y thoughts with you!
Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I receive a small compensation to help support my blog if you decide to make a purchase through my links at no cost to you.
The First Mistake follows best friends Alice and Beth. Alice is a successful interior designer who lost her first husband, Tom, unexpectedly, but has remarried the perfect man, Nathan. Beth is a single mom who struggles to make ends meet each month. Alice begins to notice strange behavior from Nathan and begins to suspect her marriage is not as perfect as she thought.
Sandie Jones’ writing is lovely. I flew through the book and it was so easy to read. I read 50 pages the night I started the book before I even realized it!
The book is written in three parts: Part one and three are the present time and part two is a flashback. I did like the part two flashback and I feel it helped tie everything together and confirmed my predicted ending.
If you read a lot of thrillers, you will feel spoon-fed during this book. I had everything worked out before part two but kept reading because I thought maybe there was an epic twist and that the ending I had guessed was a red herring. Nope. It really was that easy to work out the “twist” ending.
Major spoilers ahead
…
..
.
Two things really bothered me about the story.
First, Beth’s daughter is the same age as Alice’s second child. Beth claims her child’s father is Alice’s first husband, but her first husband has been dead more than eight years. It bothered me we are supposed to overlook that detail.
Second, I did not like that Alice saved Beth at the end. Sure, Beth had been through something terrible and she thought Alice was in on everything, but Beth was still a horrible person to make Alice think that Nathan was cheating and Tom had cheated. She knew all along that her Thomas was in fact Nathan, but she let her “best friend” think that her first husband cheated. Beth even created a fake Facebook profile to mess with Alice and make her think Tom was alive somewhere!
With a few more chapters, the author could have really made Beth the villain here because she was kind of crazy! She went to extremes to mess with Alice, and I didn’t agree with their “female power” ending of never letting a man come between them. Beth is the one who came between them with her lies.
.
..
…
End spoilers
If you need a quick beach read, I do recommend The First Mistake, but I don’t think it brings anything new to the thriller genre. If you don’t typically read thrillers, then this book would be a perfect read to see if you would like the genre!
You can purchase a copy of The First Mistake here.
I liked the book.. It was a predictable arc to some extent. All 3 don’t like each other
I liked the book but also found it predictable. But I don’t feel like that affected my reading experience because I was still flipping pages to find out what happened next!
I loved the book! But actually Beth’s daughter is the same age as Alice’s second daughter. I think you missed that.
It’s been several months since I read this, but my review does say that Beth’s daughter is the same age as Alice’s second daughter. I think (and again, it has been awhile so I’ve forgotten most of this book) my issue was I thought the second daughter was Alice’s second husband’s child, not her first husband’s child. Maybe I am mistaken about that, but that entire part of the plot felt messy to me because Beth was claiming her child’s father was Alice’s first husband’s child. The timeline was not clear to me.
Im not sure who Alice saved bc it leaves you unsure.It wasnt my favorite book , hard to follow
I agree! I was hard to follow at the end (from what I remember!).