The Girl Before

In Rena Olsen's The Girl Before, this shocking psychological thriller debut will knock you off your feet. For Clara Lawson, everything changed in the blink of an eye, when FBI agents charged inside her home and took away her husband and her "daughters." Told in Clara's POV, we learn her story about she first met and married Glen Lawson the love of her life and how they came a couple. But every love story had a dark side, when she flashes back to how she lived in her former life with him and how she trained people. In every thriller scene, we learned how she handled the truth about her abduction at the age of six and then groomed to train girls in a brothel for a human sex trafficking ring. Everything she believed were shattered like glass, when she fought for her life and the life that grew inside her. Pieces of her former life resurfaced like a completed jigsaw puzzle as she remembered the past of Glen's violent tempers and how she came to be kidnapped for seventeen years. In order for her to fight for her bright future, she needed to put the people away who'd harmed her and others behind bars to set herself free.

 This was a truly emotional and intense psychological thriller debut from Rena Olsen. This touched on the hard-core topic of human sex trafficking rings that still  goes on these day. I did care for Clara/Diana throughout this story and how she entered that dark world and cared for those girls. She became strong and tough as a young woman who broken free from the past and learned the truth from the lies. I loved the various locations from the brothel to the therapy and the prison in Midwestern regional area here in the USA. This would make you want to root for Clara from start to finish as she remembered how she was the little girl before with non-stop action, drama, intense suspense and plenty of intrigue.

Will you be there to help her who she was as the girl before today?