Detailed plot synopsis reviews of Behind Closed Doors |
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Grace finally uses the sleeping pills and puts them in Jack's brandy. A few minutes later she runs away from him and he grabs her and tries to toss her in the basement. But because he is partially drugged she grabs on to him and he falls down with her. Grace gets up and locks him in the basement.
Then Grace goes on a long planned trip to Thailand that Jack had arranged. She tells everyone that Jack had to stay at home to finish one of his trials and that she went ahead. When Grace returns home, she learns that Jack is dead. The police say that it was a suicide.
They say Jack took sleeping pills but didn't take enough to kill himself. However, he was locked in the basement and eventually died from thirst. The police don't think it at all odd that someone would kill themselves by locking themselves in a basement, and Grace is never a suspect. How likely is any of this? I say, not very.
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Literary Criticism:
In the beginning, I was somewhat impressed with this book because I didn't expect what was going to happen. Most books are predictable from the first chapter. I enjoyed this one to a degree at the beginning because I honestly didn't know what was going to happen.
But the exposition of the book was lacking. Jack liked to torture people. We get it. But we never really got to see Jack torture anyone. We never knew what kind of torture things he went to Thailand for; he toyed with Grace and locked her up, but never really tortured her, and he talked many times about his desire to torture Millie, but never said exactly what he would do with her once he got her. I wasn't looking for descriptions of torture for torture's sake, but at the same time the utter vagueness of this fundamental nature of Jack's character made this book feel more than a little incomplete.
My other big problem with this book was Grace. As noted many times in the summary, Grace had many, many options to escape. She allowed herself to be embarrassed into hysterics; if it had been most people, they would have beat up Jack and/or run away in Thailand in the early part of the book. Despite all her protests Grace mostly acted like a willing slave, so not only was it hard to be sympathetic to her, but the entire story lacked some credibility.
And the story was short, less than 300 pages, because once we understood the setup, not much happened. Jane didn't make any elaborate escape attempts, and the other characters were forgettable, except for Millie, when she talked like the Frankenstein monster. "Jack, Jack baddddd! Must kill! Killllll!"
