And when she starts getting threatening Facebook messages from Maria, she is absolutely is terrified as she has a lot to lose. As for the ending to this one, I thought the author did a great job keeping it a believable outcome overall while adding in a few extra little twists to the story. Adult Louise is dealing with what it means to have a dead girl that she felt responsible for popping back up in her life. Eventually, Louise begins to feel isolated from her friends and turns her back on Maria in a particularly cruel manner. So, what would you do if someone you’d gone to school with, but had sadly died years ago, sends you a friend request on Facebook?

More or less amicably divorced and raising a young son, her thriving interior design business is not enough to vanquish the unresolved feelings of guilt from those school days of yore.

Then the flashing back to the high school days shows the reader just what had happened to Maria that night to make Louise live her life full of guilt. As a stream of messages from Maria start to arrive which make clear Louise’s culpability in the events she is forced to revisit her memories and her behaviour that night.

All in all this was an excellent read where I both detested Louise, but also rooted for her based on her self imprisonment. She grew up in Wiltshire, studied English at the University of Sussex and currently lives in Kent with her family.

For me Facebook is a way of connecting with people with whom I'd otherwise wouldn't be able to keep in touch, like some of my school mates, or friends who live abroad. Mean girls, bullying in highschool, cliques and wanting to be one of the in crowd, subjects covered in many books. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory.

But the pace of the book increased the further I read, as did my anxiety and feelings of unease and the desperate need for resolution and closure. Instead of shying away from these topics, Laura Marshall does a brilliant job of handling them with ease.I was gripped with curiosity from the first page and at my third sitting I could not put the book down - I finished it at 3am in the morning! The only certainty is that Maria Weston disappeared that night, never to be heard from again - until now. I liked many things: the clever writing, how everything is kept tight to the plot, no unnecessary straying or indulgences; the brilliant descriptive employ of words to conjure up exact visual scenes in your head as you read; and the insightful references to childhood bullying, the traps of social media and the difficulties of relationships and the consequences of failure especially with respect to children. Right after the acceptance, Louise receives a message from Sophie which seems to take Louise back to high school when she sought Sophie’s approval. I just finished reading this book, and I'd like to add that the chapters in Italics were indeed confusing at first,but when Sam confesses everything to Louise, he mentions his wife (at the moment), Catherine.

As Maria's messages start to escalate, Louise forces herself to reconnect with the old friends she once tried so hard to impress. The terrible toll bullying takes on the bullied, those close to them, and even the guilt years later of the one who had a part in the bullying. As I read the final chapters, the acoustic guitar sounds of Bryan Adams ‘everything I do I do it for you’ happened to be strumming in the background – this ‘dramatic tune’ seemed to intensify every word as I eagerly read through to then end of the book, like watching the final dramatic scenes of a good film! A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Chipped plant pots trail the dead brown remains of my doomed summer attempt at growing my own herbs, and the darkening afternoon sky is a dull sheet of slate grey.Thanks to Netgalley and Little, Brown Book Group UK for giving me the opportunity to read this in exchange for an honest review. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection, 2016, etc. A part of me is screaming out to do this, to end it here; but another part of me – a quiet and buried part – wants to see, to know. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.