Book Review: Your Life is Mine | Nathan Ripley

In Your Life is Mine, instant national bestseller Nathan Ripley follows up the success of Find You in the Dark with another suspenseful page-turner—this time about a woman whose notorious father died when she was a child, but whose legacy comes back to haunt her.

About the Book

Blanche Potter never expected to face her past again—but she can’t escape it.

Blanche, an up-and-coming filmmaker, has distanced herself in every way she can from her father, the notorious killer and cult leader, Chuck Varner. In 1996, when she was a small child, he went on a shooting spree before turning the gun on himself.

Now, Blanche learns that her mother has been murdered. She returns to her childhood home, where she soon discovers there’s more to the death than police are willing to reveal. The officer who’s handling the case is holding information back, and a journalist who’s nosing around the investigation is taking an unusual interest in Blanche’s family.

Blanche begins to suspect that Chuck Varner’s cult has found a new life, and that her mother’s murder was just the beginning of the cult’s next chapter.

Then another killing occurs.

Review

After a slower start, Nathan Ripley’s Your Life is Mine is a page-turner. It takes some time at first to set the stage for everything, since there is a lot of back story to this novel. The book gets more complex as the story progresses, and I found it to have more depth than the average thriller.

The book centers around documentary filmmaker, Blanche Potter. Her work on a true crime film has finally started to earn her some success and credibility in the industry. Years ago, Blanche changed her name to distance herself from her own true crime story. Blanche is the daughter of notorious cult leader, Chuck Varner, who died in 1996 after a murder spree that Blanche was a witness to as a young child. No one other than Blanche’s closest friend knows who she truly is, and Blanche intends to keep it that way. After all, she can’t be certain that some of her father’s followers aren’t still out in the world, biding their time before carrying on her father’s mission. Blanche knows as well as anyone how influential and powerful her father could be.

When Blanche learns that her mother has been murdered, her feelings are complicated. She’s shocked and a bit relieved. This cuts one more tie she had to her infamous father. Despite assurances that her mother’s death was unconnected to her father, Blanche knows that isn’t true. Her mother never turned on her father, even after everything he did. Blanche left all that behind, and spent years working on herself and processing a childhood ruined by two dangerous and unstable parents. Soon after Blanche learns the news of her mother’s murder, she’s confronted by another troubling truth—the message was delivered to her by an aspiring writer who knows exactly who Blanche is. How has Blanche’s identity been leaked?

Forced to confront the past she has been running from, Blanche returns home for the first time in years. She needs to find out who killed her mother and if it’s connected to her father as she suspects. There’s another part of Blanche that fears this may be a trap. Was her mother murdered to draw her out of hiding? Blanche knows better than anyone that she has to be careful who she trusts, including herself. After all, Blanche was shaped from a young age into the person her father wanted her to be, and spent the time since burying every memory she has from that time.

One big question that looms over the story is how much Blanche was able to shed the manipulation from her parents. She has spent most of her life trying to push down the trauma of watching her father open gunfire that day in the shopping center. Blanche also has to reconcile the fact that she calmly walked home afterwards, and continued to follow the guidelines instilled in her by her father for several years afterwards. Blanche eventually found a way to leave the brainwashing that surrounded her from a young age, but she never expected her past to come find her. The death of her mother unravels the protections Blanche has put in place, and now she must confront how intertwined she is with her father’s ideas.

This is a dark book, but not a graphic book. The terror comes truly in the psychological sense, as Ripley confronts the reader with dark and often taboo content. Blanche is in a frozen state, knowing that many of her father’s followers are still out there. How will they react if they learn she has resurfaced after all of these years?

I enjoyed the excerpts from a true crime book that documents her father’s case peppered throughout the book. They added both a sense of surrealness to what was occurring in the story. Though the book was engrossing, it remained somewhat slow in pacing throughout. A lot happens at the end and I had to reread a few things to follow it all. There were some good twists, but nothing mind-blowing. This isn’t a book about the twists, it’s about the psychological terror of Blanche’s father and his followers.

Thank you to Atria Books for my copy. Opinions are my own.