The Substitute

De: Nicole Lundrigan

Narrado por: Janet Porter

Warren Botts is a disillusioned PhD, taking a break from his lab to teach middle-school science. Gentle, soft-spoken, and lonely, he innocently befriends Amanda, one of his students. But one morning, Amanda is found dead in his backyard, and Warren, shocked, flees the scene.

As the small community slowly turns against him, an anonymous narrator, a person of extreme intelligence and emotional detachment, offers insight into events past and present. As the tension builds, we gain an intimate understanding of the power of secrets, illusions, and memories.

Nicole Lundrigan uses her prodigious talent to deliciously creepy effect, producing a finely crafted thriller and a chilling look into the mind of a psychopath.

©2017 Nicole Lundrigan (P)2018 Anansi Audio

WOW!

this was a really good book. it kept me interested even though some parts were a little depressing but it was really good. the narrator did a great job.

A riveting page turner

I could hardly put this book down. The minimal use of names throughout the book kept me guessing until the very end. An excellent read.

Twisted

Having read Nicole Lundrigan's "An Unthinkable Thing" and now this, I am convinced that the author has a particular... interest ( I am loathe to use the word "obsession" as I am all too aware of the power of words) in childhood sociopathy. She seems to normalize it in a way that doesn't invite understanding, curiosity or empathy, but in a way that shames, nay, gaslights the reader into thinking that any questioning of the child subject's motives or actions is a reflection of his or her own moral inflexibility. Yes, children are flawed, yes, they often do horrendous, cruel things, and their actions can reflect the environment in which they are raised, yet reading this author's work so far has for me felt like a gut punch to my sensibilities. I don't even believe that it can reasonably be argued that the actions of narrator in this story was motivated by the love of her sister. She was a selfish, loathsome, hateful being from the beginning whose goal was to craft her sister into her own image, and failing that, used a tragedy to embark on a mission of misguided revenge porn. Everything about this novel left me feeling unclean, and I didn't think I could feel as bad as I did after An Unthinkable Thing, one of the most, if not the single most horrific tales of man's inhumanity to man I've ever had the misfortune to read.