The difficult second novel doesn't seem to have presented a huge problem for SJ Watson. The author of best-selling debut novel Before I Sleep plunges the reader into a pretty grisly and gripping world from a very early stage of Second Life and the whole book is a real page-turning thriller from start to finish. It would be very easy to see this being adapted to the big screen like its predecessor.
In Second Life Julia Plummer adapts some pretty dark and sordid coping mechanisms after she finds out her estranged sister has been found murdered. To say she leads a second life is an understatement, beginning as a coping mechanism to try to understand how her sister died the way she did, Julia ends up on at least as dark and seedy path as her sister did where the answers she's looking for become less and less clear and her first and main life becomes hugely endangered by what she begins playing around with.
There were times when reading this book I felt like I was watching a Scream type of horror movie when you just want to shout "Don't Go Up the Stairs!"; all reason seems to have left Julia with her grief. Things that appear obviously fishy to the reader, Julia seems to be oblivious about and you want to shake her and tell her to run. The whole novel builds and becomes more and more suspenseful and has a great payoff. It's full of surprises and twists and turns that make it so hard to put down. I ended up reading this from start to finish in one day because you really need to find out what's going to happen.
The only downside, other than the frustration at the character's apparent complete lack of sense of danger, is how the novel suddenly goes down a very fashionable for this year path with the incorporation of a Fifty Shades of Grey style BDSM angle suddenly; it's just slightly jarring purely because it seems to be a trend feature with the release of the Fifty Shades movie but otherwise, if you're looking for a gripping, thrilling, page-turning read, Second Life is the perfect choice.
Second Life by SJ Watson is available now, published by Doubleday.
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