Beautiful Bad is not only an engrossing thriller of a novel but also could be taken as an interesting treatise on mental illness and some of the circumstances and events in life that may cause it to be inflicted on some people. I could easily picture the scenes as they played out, foreign and domestic, so skillful were the author’s descriptions of the lives of two people unraveling after what starts out as an intense love for each other. The look of the environments in the war torn countries at the beginning seemed so believable and the picture of the modest subdivision tract home with it’s open floor plan later on was so familiar. The secondary characters were likewise recognizable in scheme of the story and their relationship to the couple that the book revolves around.