One Night, One Secret, Two Friends - Sasha Lane

"We all want the fairy tale, don’t we? To fall in love with the perfect guy, be proposed to in the most romantic way while being presented with a gorgeous ring the size of a rock, and then plan the dream wedding before living happily ever after. But in reality do we really want that kind of public display of emotion? In a world where romance has morphed into online dating, Skype, and communicating via social media while multitasking, do we still want the sanctity of a marriage proposal carried out in a traditional and somewhat old-fashioned way? 

Emma Storey is thirty-two trying to balance her love life, friends and work. She has been in a relationship with Chris for two years and is eagerly anticipating his proposal over a romantic meal. But the proposal doesn't go quite to plan and Emma's world is flipped upside down. To make matters worse, Emma’s best friend, Sophie, is full of the joys of a new relationship with her new man, Connor, whom Emma is yet to meet. 

Emma’s mother – homely housewife turned sophisticated divorcée businesswoman – persuades Emma to take a few days’ respite from the situation and visit her in New York. But two weeks later Emma is still feeling sorry for herself, so her two work friends, Jenny and Lola, take her out. There she meets a cute guy at the bar, who introduces himself as Johnny. He easily charms a drunken Emma back to his apartment for ‘coffee’ but this proves to have devastating consequences. 

Emma is then forced to keep her secret or risk losing everything."

I quite enjoyed this novel, more than I was expecting to. Emma's story is pretty unusual, and quite scary in some places, however I did think that it could have been a little more refined. For me, Connor was just not frightening enough. Although he was definitely not a very pleasant person, I do think the author could have taken his nastiness even further and created even more drama. In some places the writing was little clunky (for want of a better word!), and maybe a little more editing could have been done to make things a little bit sharper. That said, I still didn't stop reading, and although it was fairly slow paced at the beginning, the little asides in italics after every few chapters kept me hooked enough to see what the end result was going to be. 

I'm going to give 3 stars for One Night, it would have been higher but I would have liked to see the characters be a little more fleshed out - I wanted to know a bit more about Connor and Sophie. Also, there were a few typos and a few blank pages, however the book is self published so I was expecting a few little glitches. I will be looking out for more by Sasha Lane.

One Night, One Secret, Two Friends is out now and you can get it here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/One-Night-Secret-Two-Friends-ebook

*I was kindly given my copy by the author*