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    Black Out: A Novel
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    Black Out: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Black Out: A Novel
    Audiobook13 hours

    Black Out: A Novel

    Written by Lisa Unger

    Narrated by Ann Marie Lee

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    When my mother named me Ophelia, she thought she was being literary. She didn't realize she was being tragic.


    On the surface, Annie Powers's life in a wealthy Floridian suburb is happy and idyllic. Her husband, Gray, loves her fiercely; together, they dote on their beautiful young daughter, Victory. But the bubble surrounding Annie is pricked when she senses that the demons of her past have resurfaced and, to her horror, are now creeping up on her. These are demons she can't fully recall because of a highly dissociative state that allowed her to forget the tragic and violent episodes of her earlier life as Ophelia March and to start over, under the loving and protective eye of Gray, as Annie Powers. Disturbing events-the appearance of a familiar dark figure on the beach, the mysterious murder of her psychologist-trigger strange and confusing memories for Annie, who realizes she has to quickly piece them together before her past comes to claim her future and her daughter.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMay 27, 2008
    ISBN9780739366394
    Unavailable
    Black Out: A Novel
    Author

    Lisa Unger

    LISA UNGER, guest editor, is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of twenty novels, including her latest, Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six. She has been nominated for or won numerous awards, including the Strand Critics, Audie, Macavity, ITW Thriller, and Goodreads Choice Awards as well as the Hammett Prize. In 2019, she received two Edgar Award nominations, an honor held by only a few authors, including Agatha Christie. Lisa is currently copresident of the International Thriller Writers organization.

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    Reviews for Black Out

    3.5/5

    209 ratings28 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This was a gripping thriller with so many twists and turns that I'm still struggling with what was real and what wasn't. At first I struggled with the three main time frames - the present, the recent past and the deep past, but once I had them worked out I was captivated.

      Annie is a vulnerable protagonist. She is mentally fragile and suffers from a dissociative disorder. Throughout the book her horrific, abusive past is revealed and, although now happily married with a four-year old daughter, her life is suddenly disrupted as her past comes back to haunt her.

      A wonderful psychological thriller that had me hooked from the start.
    • 5/5
      brilliant....
    • 3/5
      An ordinary wife and mother, Annie Powers, is not so ordinary as she first appears. But then, neither is her husband who works in a company that does business in a post-9/11 world, Gray Powers perhaps offering his wife the unique assistance that allows a troubled young woman to create a different life after years of trauma. But this chance to start over, with Gray and daughter, Victory, on Florida's Gulf Coast isn't purchased without considerable cost. Gray's private enterprises facilitate his shielding of Annie and this is a bargain she is willing to make. Finally secure, even a little careless of late, Annie is suddenly overtaken by an eerie sense that she is being watched, that the impossible has happened and "he" has returned to claim her. She knows she is safe, that Gray has effectively erased the past, but it is all shattered in a moment in the soft repetition of a name, "Ophelia".

      The major flaw with "Black Out" is how Lisa Unger structures the story. Unfortunately, she decides not to unfold the plot in a linear fashion. Instead she constantly jumps back and forth through time in an episodic manner, which prevents the storyline from gaining any true momentum. I also felt the plot was at times confusing, making it difficult for me to understand what was going on. The ending is similarly ambigious and perplexing, which led me to view this book with a certain amount of frustration.
    • 3/5
      I like Lisa Unger and have read a few of her books - I'm a sucker for psychological thrillers and picked up Black Out because it looked promising. Overall it wasn't bad, though I did not particularly like any of the characters except Ophelia/Annie's dad, and I was not a fan of any of the character names: Ophelia, Gray, Victory, Marlowe, etc. The twists were good, though a little predictable, and I don't regret picking up Black Out.
    • 2/5
      Sorry, I couldn't even finish the book. It was so confusing and depressing I wanted to turn it off. If this was a movie, maybe it would make more sense. Listening to it, the story jumped all over in time and very hard to follow without any visual. There was no humor to balance the mental illness like there is in The Glass Castle, so the reader gets dragged down into the black hole with the character. The narrator communicated the stress of the main character in her voice, "Othelia", which only made me edgy. If this was a two hour movie, maybe I would have enjoyed it........... Listening to it in my car over several days was too much stress on my way to work and back. Very dark story.
    • 3/5
      An enjoyable read with a focus on mental illness, or at least the lead character could be said to be mentally ill along with some of ther other characters. The topic is not my favourite, however, the underlying story to this yarn was interesting.
    • 4/5
      Excellent mystery! I was interested in the story until the end, it was neither predictable nor boring. It was full of surprises and intrigue. A murder, a stolen identity, a past you can't escape, your protector is also your husband, a daughter named Victory with some question as to who her father is...I loved the book and will read more by this author.
    • 5/5
      What a ride! A page-turner which grips you from beginning to end. Lisa Unger knows how to bring on the suspense and not let go.
    • 3/5
      I started this book with high expectations but slowly I'm afraid I became increasingly disengaged from the story and indeed the heroine. There's something immensely irritating about Annie Powers and I never felt I was allowed to get beneath the surface of her character. I think it's something to do with the fact that there's a lot of telling and not very much showing the reader what's going on in this book. Not only that, but so many different things are going on in so many different timeframes and to so many different people (who might or might not be real) that after a while I started skipping, especially towards the end. There is a grain or two of a really great story here, however. It's just a shame that it's overwritten, lots of information keeps being repeated in different forms, and it goes on far too long. A good hundred pages could have been lost with no real dent in the plot. That said, I did actually think the ending is one of the most powerful things about it. I've seen comments from readers who are very annoyed about the ending - and I can very well understand why. However, for me, the ending did at last give a real and solid glimpse into the heart of Annie Powers, and so felt in that sense very satisfying indeed. Just a shame the rest of the novel couldn't have been the same.
    • 1/5
      Garbage. Badly written and totally confusing. Apparently the author wanted to know something about mentally ill people so she consulted a lot of shrinks. She would have been better off consulting a writing consultant.My sister in law abandoned the book after an hour.
    • 2/5
      Did not care for this one all that much. I finished it instead of giving up on it so I gave it 2 stars but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I didn't really like the main character. She had definite mental problems but her dissociative behavior and fugue states got redundant after a while. I did not feel suspense while reading this. I thought it was very drawn out. The flashbacks were necessary to the plot but were also distracting and took away from the pacing of the book. The book was very slow and quite boring in parts.
    • 4/5
      Lisa Unger's novels are always entertaining, and this one, a psychological thriller where the reader has to question how much s/he is reading is fantasy or delusion and how much is the crazy truth. Story of a woman with a sad, tragic past, now happily married with a young daughter... until her past catches up with her. She spends much of the book on a journey to understanding her past and holding on to her present.
    • 3/5
      Lisa Unger has written some great books and she’s written some stinkers. BLACK OUT is somewhere in between.Ophelia grew up with unloving parents. Her father was mostly absent, both physically and mentally, and her mother seemed too stupid and selfish to be able to love her. As a result, Ophelia became unhinged, mentally ill. And it got worse while she willingly and unwillingly accompanied a murderer through several states. She was traumatized and unable to save herself.Now Ophelia is Annie. She is happily married and has a child. (Speaking of which, both Ophelia/Annie and her mother pick names for their children like most people pick names for their pets. Victory?) Her mental illness, seemingly, continues.Because I love this type of book, mystery/suspense/thriller, I often must have a willing suspension of disbelief. But BLACK OUT asks for too much. Why were Ophelia/Annie and her husband so duped? This is never adequately explained, at least not enough to suit me.Worse, though, are the loose ends: Ophelia/Annie’s friend Ella and the detective. Who was Ella? Why is the detective there and suddenly not? No answers, just possibilities.
    • 4/5
      A while back I requested a Lisa Unger book as an ARC, but didn’t win it. She’s been on my radar since and when some copies of her books came my way, I made sure to read one. Although I think the plot was needlessly convoluted, it was a fun book to read. Changeable. Crazy. Shifting. Never knowing which way was up. Like I said, fun. Not in any way believable, but it’s fiction so you have to go with it.Annie/Ophelia is sympathetic and oddly not sympathetic. She reminds you too much of Mallory in Natural Born Killers and because she’s such an unreliable narrator, it’s not hard to imagine she’s equally culpable in Marlowe’s crimes. Still her childhood is basically a nightmare and its not a surprise she lets herself become enslaved by Marlowe. Any port in a storm.By the end, you’re feeling just as confused and betrayed as Annie. Everywhere you look are people behaving badly and lying. It’s off-putting and not everything is wrapped up tightly. Loose ends abound and I wonder if we’ll see Annie Ophelia again sometime when her friend Ella finally shows.
    • 5/5
      This was the first time I have read one of Lisa`s books and I found that I enjoyed it. The first couple chapters were a little tough to get through but I found myself having a tough time putting the book down once I got into it. I`ll be looking for more of Lisa`s books to read just to see if they are as good.
    • 4/5
      This psychological thriller is so twisty and turn-y I'm still not sure what actually happened. But, that doesn't matter because it was an awesome ride! (Note: I usually try to put a plot summary in my reviews, but like I said, I don't actually know what happened.)
    • 4/5
      In Black Out by Lisa Unger Suburban housewife Annie Powers' life begins to unravel with the appearance of a dark figure from the past on the beach near her home. Annie has tried to put her former life behind her -- a dysfunctional family is to put it mildly. As a teen, Annie (then Ophelia) ran away from home and was controlled and manipulated by a psychopathical killer.Annie/Ophelia has blacked out many of the details of what happened. In a complicated dance, we learn about her past and present, her search for the truth, and that things are not what they seem. This is truly a psychological thriller. The reader (and even Annie herself) is never sure what is true and what is not.I was sucked into Annie's effort to find herself and take control of her life. I wish that her husband Gray's character was built up a bit more in the story so that the end of the story would be more believeable. But, all in all, a good read.
    • 4/5
      As summer begins, we need those scary mysteries about the serial killer so we can shiver looking out in the dark of an isolated cabin or campsite and Blackout is a good book to pack along on such an outing. I read most of it over the course of one evening but I purchased Sliver of Truth at the same time so I can now read it.. I tend to prefer British and European thrillers but no one does the creepy serial killers better than American writers. That is probably because they actually have a lot of them and the books are more believable. There is a well developed history of how such individuals move through the US Justice system and no doubt lots of research material available. Think of the quandry of the Scandinavian thriller writers like Norwegian Jo Nesbo. Norway has never had a serial killer and in fact this is discussed in some of Nesbo's novels with the police consulting with the FBI who have superior skills in profiling. Black Out succeeds well in it's genre, not as gory as Chelsea Cain (thank god) but dark and horrifying.
    • 3/5
      I struggled through the first half of this book, not sure if I wanted to finish it or not---just too much confusion for the main character--Annie, or Ophelia! But then the whole story picked up and I found myself just too curious about what on earth was going to happen to this poor woman as she tried to figure out the mess she was in. And then, of course, it speeded right up and all of a sudden, the book was done! Very intriguing plot--frighteningly realistic over the idea of not being believed for what you believe to be reality.
    • 4/5
      This book was a quick read. It draws the reader in because the main character doesn't even know her past. The reader gets to find out the characters past as she does. The thing that bothered me about this book is the ending. At the very end of the novel you don't really know if the character has hallucinated a lot the plot or if it's real. I give this book 3.5 out of 5 stars
    • 4/5
      Hmmmm? Never read Lisa Unger until now, but this novel definitely has a "Dean Koontz" flavor to it---the pervading nightmare quality that leaves the reader unsure what is real, what is imagined. Really, at the end of it, I was almost ready for some ptsd therapy. This poor girl Ophelia (oka Annie) had been through so much trauma I don't know how she could possibly function afterwards, much less go on to lead a normal life. However, I thought that Lisa Unger must certainly have been subject to some suffering herself to speak with such authority ("Most of us don't live in the present tense. We dwell in a mental place where our regrets and grudges from our past compete with our fears about the future. Sometimes we barely notice what's going on around us, we're so busy time traveling.") All in all, not a bad little bang-bang whodunit.
    • 4/5
      Excellent. Annie is an adult, is married and has a young child. She has flashbacks to childhood when her mother brought a serial killer into their lives. The son was also a killer. Everyone thinks she is just mentally ill. The flashbacks turn out to be real events. Also, everyone around her is deceiving her. She fights to solve the mystery. This is extremely suspenseful and delves into psychology as well.
    • 5/5
      Bravo!!!! I am a fan of Lisa Unger but I have to say that she amazed me with this book. I often grade a book by how fast they catch and keep my attention. This was a ride (roller coaster!) from the first page. I will be recommending this book for many years to come. I don't usually write reviews but I had to write this one. If you want a book you can not put down....This is it!
    • 4/5
      I picked up this book thinking it picked up after Unger's previous novels, "Beautiful Lies" and "Sliver of Truth." I was disappointed when I learned that I would not be reading about the characters that I had gotten used to, but I am glad that I gave this one a chance. Annie lives an ideal life in a lovely home on the beach in Florida with her husband Gray and their young daughter Victory. Plagued by migraines and black outs, Annie is confronted with a series of events that forces her to remember a series of horrible events from years ago, when she was Ophelia, a troubled young girl with no way out.
    • 4/5
      I feel like in order to enjoy Unger's novels, you have to disconnect a bit with any sense of reality in order for them to be believable. That being said, they are well written, suspenseful and thoroughly enjoyable.
    • 4/5
      I'm still sorting through the ending in my mind. I didn't like that the book leaves you with unanswered questions (in my opinion). Not as compelling as her first two books, but a good thriller all the same. I do hope her next book brings us back to Ridley.
    • 5/5
      Amazing....a gripping read that twists and turns right until the very end and beyond. After finishing the book, I am still sorting through the story linking bits of information together. I love Lisa Unger's delicate way of weaving and linking interesting facts and information throughout the story. For people who like to read a nice and tidy package, this isn't the book for you.
    • 5/5
      This is a story of how a girl with a broken family and very dark past is able to forgive/forget issues in her past life and live for the present. It may sound like a thousand other story lines but this one is very well written. It was a very enjoyable read. Thanks Lisa. This is a step above her other books.