Book Review: Shattered Identity

Title: Shattered Identity

Author: Betsy Love

Date: 2024

Publisher: Lovelight

Quote: "Obviously, he thought I was someone else."

How unlucky is it to see your double? Usually it all depends on how visible your double is to everyone else. Hallucinations of seeing your mirror image as a person on the street, often seeing the person vanish on being recognized, are part of a rare, fatal brain disorder. Simply meeting the person who looks like your long-lost twin, who may in fact be a distant cousin, is usually good for a little harmless confusion. Famous people often pay their doubles to stick around and provide useful confusion; the easiest way to dodge the paparazzi is to let them follow the double around for a few hours. But what happens if everyone else sees your double before you do? 

Two young women staying at a tourist hotel in Mexico notice people behaving strangely toward them. Amelia is rich, involved in lucrative but murky family business, and engaged to Brent, who somehow manages to care more about her than about her money, even though we see her acting like a spoiled rich brat. Savannah is well off, involved in a church where women outnumber men, and worried that at twenty-four she's not found a member of the church to marry; she's come to Mexico to have fun with her best friend and forget about men. 

And it's not only Brent who speaks to Savannah as if they'd ever properly met. Someone is stalking Amelia; someone wants her belongings, though they don't seem all that valuable on the surface. Brent's intolerable ex-wife and her more likable but not necessarily more ethical mother have followed him and Amelia to Mexico. Worse yet, so has Amelia's stepbrother, whom neither Brent nor Amelia trust. When Brent's ex grabs him, Brent pushes her away. She falls down, skins her knee, and complains bitterly. She's not a nice girl at all--she sneers at Amelia being a goody-goody, which is not how Amelia's presented to readers--and Brent can think of lots of people who might have murdered her, when she's found murdered. Because everyone knows he shoved her, however, Brent finds himself the prime suspect.

Both Amelia and Savannah find their vacation experience so creepy that they want to take the very next plane back to the States. When they find themselves boarding the same plane, a lot of the mysteries clear up. Amelia wishes she'd stayed with Brent; Savannah wishes she'd stayed with her friend Haley. But they're on the same plane with each other. Brent and Haley will follow on other planes.

The plane the twenty-something women are on crashes.

The woman who survives has a concussion  She doesn't know which one of the look-alikes she was. Nobody seems to remember which one was wearing what. Recognizing a ring he gave his daughter, Savannah's father takes the concussed woman home from the hospital as Savannah. 

But she has no memories of being Savannah. She doesn't remember being anyone else, either, but she doesn't seem to have grown up in a Christian family. 

The plot may not otherwise seem very "Christian," but both Brent and the woman with the concussion learn to pray as they work their way toward a meeting that will reveal, once the question has been broached, which of the doubles the concussed woman really is. 

Meanwhile, a handsome young man accepts the concussed young woman as Savannah and wants to be her boyfriend. He seems so understanding about the concussion she indisputably has had, and the Christian values she may remember having as she recovers, keeping the relationship wholesome. It's almost like a brother-sister relationship. He wants to be part of her family and help her redecorate her room in her childhood home. Readers know he's interested in doing this because he wants to investigate her room. The concussed woman feels something for this man, and agrees to marry him just because he seems so nice, but she's not sure whether what she feels is attraction or, perhaps, some new symptom of her oncussion.

Sweet romance quickly turns into action-adventure toward the end of this full-length novel. If you like suspense in a sweet romance, you will enjoy Shattered Identity.