Contemporary Domestic Thriller published by Crooked Lane Books 10 Mar 20
It seems to me that the life of an Influencer is, by its very nature, a lonely and precarious existence, irrespective of the perks it might seem to offer. This concept is strengthened by the fact that for much of this book we don’t even see the central character, mummy-vlogger Violet Young, but instead follow the lives of those on whom she has had the most impact: her husband Henry and two of her most obsessive followers, Yvonne and Lily, whose respective interests in Violet seem to stem from very different problems of their own.
Yvonne is a successful photographer, in her early forties and desperate for a baby. She is undergoing fertility treatment with her much younger husband, and is jealous of the ease with which Violet has managed to get pregnant three times. While Yvonne drops many of the online friends she meets on various discussion forums once they start families of their own – often after months of trying – she can’t stop returning to Violet’s posts. And gradually we learn the reasons why.
Lily is younger than both Yvonne and Violet. A single parent to a young son, and struggling to survive in a low-salary job, she follows Violet because of their shared experiences of postnatal depression. When Violet disappears from the internet, Lily sets out to track her down with the help of a journalist. However, Lily is also not all that she at first seems to be.
Henry is not a nice man, and that’s putting it mildly. One of those annoying characters who always manages to survive when those around him are struggling, he works mainly in the world of traditional media, but has also had limited success as an influencer, feeding off his wife’s career. After Violet’s online disappearance, he is quick to seek the help of family members to look after their three children and seems to be carrying on as normal, but it soon transpires that some of his current problems are very much the result of past misdeeds.
Violet’s followers speculate wildly about the reasons for her disappearance and about whether anything she told them was the whole truth. None, however, comes close to guessing what really happened.
I liked the structure of this book. Snippets are revealed about each character as they go about their daily lives in the aftermath of Violet’s disappearance, and we also see flashbacks to what happened in Violet’s life to cause her to vanish. There were some threads running through the story that, with hindsight, I should have picked up on sooner, but that was in no way the fault of the author. The truths about each of the characters, when they finally emerge, were by turns shocking and, in Henry’s case especially, not entirely without well-plotted foreshadowing. The ending left things a little open, but that just made the situations the characters found themselves in as a result of what had happened both chilling and more relatable.
Grade: A
Summary:
A gripping domestic thriller examining the terrifying depths of our social media obsessions.
You can’t stop watching her.
Violet Young is a hugely popular journalist-turned-mummy-influencer, with three children, a successful husband and a million subscribers on YouTube who tune in daily to watch her everyday life unfold.
Until the day she’s no longer there.
But one day she disappears from the online world – her entire social media presence deleted overnight, with no explanation. Has she simply decided that baring her life to all online is no longer a good idea, or has something more sinister happened to Violet?
But do you really know who Violet is?
Her fans are obsessed with finding out the truth, but their search quickly reveals a web of lies, betrayal, and shocking consequences…
Read an excerpt.
