Chatroom With A View by Glenn Maynard
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Troy Cullen is a young man with his life ahead of him, but his life in the small town he calls home is anything but normal, he works in the local diner as the night manager and works with a couple of waitresses he has known for a while in passing, when he isn’t there, he is at home where he lives with his parents or he is at the local bar with his best and only friend, sometimes he goes on an internet chatroom to meet girls and look for love, but he isn’t normally too successful and is usually blown off or stood up when it comes to meeting in person. One night, he returns home from work and he know something isn’t right in the house. As he looks around for his parents, all he can hear is silence, and despite the fact his father isn’t overly talkative, it is more unnerving because of it, so as he searches the house for them, he sees that there is a light on in one of the outbuildings, but what he sees within those lights makes him run the fastest he can to get there and this is where he sees the one thing he was most scared of happening in front of his eyes. As things go from bad to worse, Troy has to make some tough decisions and carry them out afterward despite everything that has happened, however, what he decides to do in the end is the lesser of two evils.

Troy eventually completes his tasks which he has set himself and sorts himself out ready for bed where he is out like a light as soon as his head hits the pillow, the next morning, he has to go on living his life in the usual way, however, there is a complication, his dysfunctional family is now even more so, but the topper of the day is when his phone and email light up with multiple messages from his ex-girlfriend Veronica trying to convince his to meet her again, when he tells her he wants nothing to do with her, she doesn’t believe him and instead, decides to convince him it is the other way round and that he needs her in his life. As Troy heads to work, he overhears the conversation the two waitresses are having and he realises what they are talking about seems all too familiar and this has him seething with anger. As all the stress of his living situation starts to get to him, being lonely and somewhat of an outcast is normal for him, but it doesn’t mean he likes it, but when Veronica continues to call, message and email him in a more and more frantic manner, he finally answers the phone and much to his dismay, she announces that she is pregnant and that the baby is his. This news comes as a shock to Try as he was careful and they only met a few times, however, his brain cannot integrate this new information and a shouting match ensues over the phone, in the end, Troy tells Veronica he doesn’t believe her and even if it is true, he wants nothing to do with any of it, this enrages Veronica and so she decides to put a plan into action to find out everything she can about Troy and find a way into his life again.

Meanwhile, as Veronica is concocting her plan to win Troy over, he is concocting a plan of his own, he has been listening to the waitresses conversations and he knows that he has to get back at them for what they are doing, so he decides to play them at their own game and see how they like it, he ropes in his best friend who is more than happy to help and all he has to do is sit and wait, but Veronica’s plan throws a spanner into the works. Will Troy and Veronica’s plans work out as they want them to, or will things come to a head in a much different way than expected? This is a thrilling story of two people and how what starts as a small detail can blow up into something much bigger and with consequences nobody could dream of, it will hook you in and send you on a journey of discovery into how nature and nurture can affect someone and whether there is such a thing as a “Killer Gene” like in the case of Lizzie Borden.

Review by @roxsannel

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