Liz Loves Books.Com.

Publication Date: 1st May 2014 from Quercus.

Thank you to the author and publisher for the review copy.

Struggling with a new baby, Yvonne turns to netmammy, an online forum for mothers, for support. Drawn into a world of new friends, she spends increasing amounts of time online and volunteers more and more information about herself.
When one of her new friends goes offline, Yvonne thinks something is wrong, but dismisses her fears. After all, does she really know this woman?

A cleverly plotted, realistically frightening yet addictive story this one, with some intriguing and darkly fascinating twists and turns that kept me reading into the early hours of the morning. At the end of it I was left seriously considering the terrifying amounts of personal information there is out there on the internet about me and mine, and indeed about you and yours…

Yvonne is struggling with new parenthood and finds comfort in the online parenting forum NetMammy, where other Mums like herself discuss the daily grind of life with young children. The beauty and shrewdness of this story comes in the simple things – when asking for advice, you can inadvertantly tell an anonymous voice on the web a great deal about yourself. When someone she has been “close” to online seemingly vanishes, and she reads in the paper about a body being found, her mind connects the two. Dismissing it as unlikely, Yvonne moves on and further into danger.

Some great characters here – not least Sergeant Claire Boyle, pregnant herself, practical, resourceful and completely comitted to her job sometimes to the detriment of her own health – I hope she appears again, so involved did I get in her life. Yvonne and the other “NetMammy” parents are all brilliantly authentic and easy to connect with, they are as real to me as anyone and even now I’m sure I shall wonder what they are doing..

A very relevant and enthralling mystery story, a terrific and compelling look at life lived through social media and all in all an outstanding and gripping tale that will truly spook you. There is not a single thing in here that could not easily happen in reality – and that, as always, is far more unsettling than any horror story.

Fantastic. Highly Recommended. I will resist the urge to delete my entire online profile..

Happy Reading Folks!