Review: Intriguing and well-written, unconvincing ending
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 26, 2012
For a year, Rachel's sleep has been interrupted, first by a nightmare of being shut up in a wall and left to die, and second by having mind-blowing sex with a guy she's never met. At the same time, Nic has been having the same mind-blowing sex dream, and when he meets Rachel, he recognizes her as the woman in the dream. Nic is a sleep specialist and Rachel is his patient.It turns out that, coincidentally, Rachel, an architect, has been hired to restore Nic's great-grandfather's old home, which, incidentally, is haunted by a ghost that looks like her. As Nic and Rachel fall in love, Rachel's nightmare of a girl called Rochelle suffocating in a wall expands until she knows the truth of what happened there to Rochelle, a housemaid who Niccolo (our Nic's great-grandfather's father) was planning to elope with the next day.Here's where the plot begins to unravel: Nic and Rachel figure out a way to use Rachel's dream to warn Rochelle of the dastardly plot against her. O-kay. However, neither realizes at first that if they are successful, history will be changed and Nic, a descendent of his great-great-grandfather's marriage-of-convenience that happened because of Rochelle's disappearance, would never exist. Even when they DO realize it, Nic insists that they have to try it or else live with the knowledge that they didn't try to help her. Even though he knows it probably means he will never have existed. Now THIS is a little too heroic to be believed! And THAT leads to the ending that makes absolutely no sense at all.I did enjoy this story. I think the writer has a lot of potential. However, the way she incorporated the supernatural elements was not well-thought-out. One of the first things I would have done if I 'd been  Rachel would be to go down to the cellar and find the room where Rochelle was confined. Nobody seemed to think of that. And the whole idea of the maid's family safeguarding the locked room. . . come on. That was too much. There was so much potential with this story; it's disappointing that this is the way she chose to go with it.