Review: Like It Never Happened

Like It Never Happened by Jeff Hoffmann
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Less a thriller, more 'three straight white guys have a tough time because they were assholes as kids'.

Narrated by Noah Michael Levine.

I wanted this to be much more than it was.

The story centres around an incident, in a parking lot decades ago, that had 'deadly consequences'. From the get go, it's pretty obvious what the incident was and so any kind of tension that was supposed to be built on that, wasn't. The four boys hushed it all up for very thin reasons and decades later are faced with further consequences initiated by the death of one of them.

These are married men with troubled marriages, and for the most part the incident had nothing to do with that. The men are mostly just self-centred assholes, so it was a bit hard to find sympathy for them. The women are ball-busting go-getters with no time for their husbands' dramas.

Basically, I hated all of these characters.

There's supposed to be a thriller element from Naomi, wife of the deceased, because she's on a mission now to 'make them pay.' But she's just a journalist threatening them with the truth so it's pretty bland as far as thrillers go.

Mostly, the story is about how these three men regret the dumb thing they did but refuse to come clean because it will ruin lives they've already kind of ruined anyway.

Zero sympathy for any of these characters.

Narration was okay, but I didn't love the female voices. For some reason, men doing female voices sound so much more fake to me than women doing male voices. Aside from that, narration was fine. I was happy to listen to this at x1.5 speed so mercifully free of long pauses and dramatic slowness.

Can't say I'd recommend this one. Maybe if you're into family drama and broken marriages? But as a thriller it misses the mark.

With thanks to Netgalley for an audio ARC

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