At the time of writing this book is only available on Amazon/Audible and is included for free in the Audible plus catalogue.
🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 4.2/5 | Steam: 🔥
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read The Safe Room yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
Nineteen years. That is how long Amber has been living under the shadow of Peter Harlow. Nineteen years of tracking, stalking, court orders that mean nothing, and a man who refuses to accept that a fifteen-year-old girl rejecting his advances was not, in fact, the beginning of a love story. So Amber does what any person ground down by nineteen years of this would do: she builds a fortress. Literally. Security cameras everywhere, reinforced barriers, a cellar safe room designed to survive anything. She has drilled her seven-year-old daughter Sophie on evacuation codes like other kids learn their ABCs. This is her life now. And it is genuinely heartbreaking.
Then one night, during a blizzard, a woman shows up at her gate. Bruised. Bleeding. Barefoot in the snow. Claiming she is running from a husband who wants her dead. And Amber, who has one ironclad rule about never letting strangers in, breaks it. Because what kind of person leaves a woman to die in a storm?
That one decision changes everything.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
How It Started
The book alternates between past and present, and the past sections are genuinely chilling. It starts simply enough: fifteen-year-old Amber goes for a ride with Peter, a boy she knows through her mother’s social circle. He wants more, she rejects him. That should be the end of it. But for Peter, it is just the beginning. The rejection does not register as rejection. It registers as a challenge, and over the next nineteen years it mutates into something pathological.
We watch it unfold in flashback. Peter standing outside her home in the middle of the night. Her sister Hunny grabbing a knife and going out to confront him herself. Love her for that!! Her father threatening him, hitting him — then Peter immediately calling the police and having her dad arrested for assault. That baffles me. He was outside her home stalking her but still calls the police for assault charges. Her dad, who was only protecting his daughter, ends up getting charged and fined — money that their family can’t afford. Peter gets an official warning and a no-contact order that he absolutely does not follow.
Things escalate. Peter breaks into her family home and puts blood all over her bed. He completely trashes her wedding day. Blood. Urine. Mud. On everything. And Peter’s mom, Mary, gives him an alibi. His own mother is covering for him. She is hanging out with Amber’s mom while all of this is happening, feeding Peter information and protecting him from consequences. That detail sat with me. The obsession starts to feel less like one unstable man and more like something that was quietly enabled for a very long time. And I just can’t believe that Amber’s mom continued to hang out with Peter’s mom through all of this. Her son is making their lives hell.
Amber nearly loses herself entirely at one point. She had been stockpiling pills when Hunny walked in and stopped her. That moment says everything about what years of this does to a person. Hunny flushes the pills. Hunny saves her sister. But Hunny cannot save Amber from everything. She eventually tries to kill Peter herself and ends up sentenced to twelve years in prison for it. And Amber, already cut off from her parents after Mary played both sides against her family, loses her sister too.
She marries Ed, who helped make the house safe for her. Ed dies of cancer. Peter shows up at the hospital as Ed is dying. He shows up at the funeral. There is no bottom to this man. He seems happy that Ed is dead.
The Fortress and What Broke It
Fast forward to now. Amber has Sophie, she has her compound, and she has nineteen years of hypervigilance keeping them both alive. Then Emily shows up at the gate in the middle of a blizzard, and Peter exploits the one thing Amber never lost: her compassion. A helpless woman bleeding in the snow is the one thing her protocols never accounted for.
The moment Emily is inside, the trap snaps shut. Power goes. Internet goes. Every line of communication dies. Because Emily was never a stranger. She was a Trojan horse, sent specifically because Peter knew that a woman fleeing abuse was the one thing Amber could not turn away from. He had told Emily that Amber was a psycho ex who would not let him see his kid. Emily believed him. She showed up, played her role, and thought she was going to play happy families with Peter afterward.
Amber ends up kicking Emily out, not trusting her after the power and phone lines go out. But Peter is already inside the house. Amber sees Peter, he drugs her, and she wakes up in her safe room, alone, while Sophie is trapped upstairs with Peter and Emily. The room built to keep Peter out is now keeping Amber in. The thing she spent years and years building to protect herself has become her cage. Her codes don’t work to open the door, which tells us Peter is ten steps ahead of her.
The Worst Days of Her Life
Through the battery-powered cameras in the bunker, Amber watches Peter walk through her home like he belongs there. He is introducing himself to Sophie as her daddy. Telling her he is going to protect them. I genuinely cannot.
Amber does everything she can think of. She even tries to strip on camera to lure him down to open the door. He watches for a minute and then just goes to the bathroom. Alone. That scene is so disturbing and so perfectly written because it tells you exactly what kind of man this is. He is not there out of love. He never was.
Sophie tries to escape and Peter catches her and punishes her. That section is hard to sit with. Emily starts to crack. She comes down that night and apologizes for what Peter did. Amber tells her the truth. Emily is beginning to believe her. Then Peter wakes up and it all falls apart. As Emily starts to question Peter on his stories the following day, he loses it and beats Emily so badly she ends up on the kitchen floor — dead or alive, not clear.
Sophie finally manages to escape out a window while Peter is distracted. Peter is chasing her through the storm. And Amber is watching all of it on a screen, locked in a bunker, completely helpless. It is brutal in the best possible way. Especially from a mother’s perspective — only wanting to help your child but being completely helpless.
The Ending
And then. The cameras show a woman walking through the house.
Hunny has been out of prison for six weeks. She had been keeping watch from a distance, not knowing how to come back after everything. Ed’s mom had called her when she could not get hold of Amber, and Hunny knew. She just knew. Peter was back.
Amber pours water into the socket in the safe room and trips the power. She figures she has nothing to lose at this point. Either the door opens or she remains locked inside. The door opens. She runs. All the way upstairs to find Peter and Hunny going at it. Peter gets the upper hand and Amber steps between them with a knife.
Peter tells her she will never use that knife on him. He raises a hammer. She slashes his throat before it comes down. The hammer hits her anyway.
Amber goes down, unconscious. But Peter is still breathing. And Hunny, knowing the paramedics will try to save him too, holds her hand over his mouth until he stops breathing. Nineteen years. It ends right there. She knows it’s the right thing — and she finally got to finish the job she started so many years ago.
Amber is in a coma for a week. But she pulls through. Sophie is safe. Hunny saved her. Emily is dead. Peter is dead. And for the first time in nineteen years, Amber can actually live her life. Free.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥 / 5 — One flame, and I want to be clear: there is nothing romantic here. The one steam moment is Amber stripping in front of a camera in her own cellar trying to survive long enough to get to her daughter. That is the whole flame. This is a thriller through and through. Come in expecting one.
The Ending — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Satisfied. Completely. Hunny coming back was everything. Hunny making sure Peter could not be saved felt completely right for this story. And the coma landing followed by her pulling through gave the ending just enough exhale. It did not wrap up too neatly. It just gave you what you needed. That is exactly right for a book like this.
Would I Relisten?
No. One time was the right amount. It is a lot. But I am glad I read it.
The Twist We Didn’t See Coming
Peter admits at one point that his mom would help him stalk Amber. And we see it played out in the past timeline: Mary covering for him, giving him alibis, hanging out with Amber’s own mother the whole time. A family acquaintance who knew and helped anyway. And it sounds like it was Mary’s death that finally unraveled him completely. He had held it together in his own twisted way all those years, and losing her removed whatever was containing the obsession. That is one of the more chilling things in this book. Not just the stalking itself. The fact that someone who loved him knew, and helped, and that her absence was what finally broke the dam.
Who Is This For
If you like your thrillers claustrophobic and your villains genuinely unsettling, this is for you. If you have read Verity, Behind Closed Doors, or anything else that locks you inside one house with a woman who is running out of options, this delivers. It is not a cozy read. It is not a light listen. But it is a very good one.
Where to Get This Book
📖 Physical Book
Amazon US | Amazon CA
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Audible CA | Audible US
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Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎧 | Genre: Psychological Thriller | Steam: 🔥