The Dartmoor Bookworm

I was sent a copy of this book by Netgalley in return for an honest review. OMG! I haven't read a psychological thriller like this for some time.  This is on a totally different level to The Family Upstairs, and so much better. What can I say without giving the story away.  It's about 13 year old Elissa who is a bright young girl, living with her mother.  They go away for a weekend chess tournament that Elissa is playing in and whilst Elissa goes to return something to the car she is abducted. When she comes around she is in the cellar of "The Gingerbread House', chained up and in the dark.  Her captor visits her but so does Elijah, a 12 year old boy who doesn't want Elissa to leave. He sees her as his new friend. Elissa realises that she isn't the first girl who has been brought here and the story follows the time after Elissa's disappearance. The story is brilliantly written, even when you think you've sussed it out, there's a twist a...

I was sent a free copy of this book by Netgalley in return for an honest review. I read Josie's debut novel "One Day in December" and loved it, it was memorising from the start and so when I saw this up for review on Netgalley I jumped at the chance.  It had a lot of live up to. The story is based, obviously, around Lydia Bird, who at the start of the book looses her fiancé, Freddie in a car crash on her birthday. The story then follows Lydia as she goes through the path of grief and how she deals with it. Her life takes two routes, her everyday life grieving for Freddie and a life in which Freddie still exists. After battling sleep in the first few weeks after the accident she starts taking sleeping pills which take her to her other world, where the plans she and Freddie had are still played out and she goes between the two worlds in the rest of the book. Lydia has strong relationships with her sister and her mother and all three characters are really well writt...