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| Avon 22 March 2018 My thanks to the publishers for my copy of the book and for the invitation to be part of this blog tour |
What's it all about...
Sometimes your first love won’t let you go…
Lou Wandsworth is used to being headline news as, aged fourteen, she ran away to France with her 31-year-old teacher, Mike Hughes.
Now 32, Lou’s life is in tatters – and she resolves to return home to confront Mike for the damage he has caused. But she soon finds that Mike is unchanged, and is focussing his attention on 13-year-old Chloe Meadows.
Determined to make sure that history doesn’t repeat itself, Lou decides to take matters into her own hands. But Mike is a predator of the worst kind, and as she tries to bring him to justice, it’s clear that Lou could once again become his prey…
My thoughts...
Even from the very start of The Fear, there's a real sense of unease, and that disturbing sense of creepiness never goes away.
At the start of the novel, we meet Lou Wandsworth, a troubled young woman who has had more than her fair share of misery. The horrors of what happened to her as a fourteen year old schoolgirl have never gone away, and time has done little to lessen the psychological impact of being groomed and then abducted by a man old enough to be her father. After years of living in London, Louise, now thirty two years old, returns to live back in her home town, only to discover that something similar is happening again, and that her abductor is up to his old tricks.
Right from the start of this clever psychological thriller I was drawn into the complex and dangerous world of control, deceit and deception, and so compelling is the writing that there were times when I simply couldn’t read the words fast enough, and as the sentences tumbled and twirled in my head, so I wanted to jump into the pages so that I could urge the story go faster and faster. Irrespective of my urging, the story moves along at a cracking pace anyway, and it is testament to the skill of the author that when events start to veer off in a very disturbing direction, so my heartbeat shot up another notch on my emotional, Richter scale.
As with anything that this talented author writes, the plot is superbly controlled, and there are so many twists and turns that many times I thought that I had the measure it, only to have the story swerve in an entirely unexpected direction. The different viewpoints from the major characters, add both complexity and understanding, and even though some of the accounts, particularly that of fourteen year old Lou are distressing to read, you can’t fail to become totally invested in the overall outcome of the story. Layers upon fascinating layers of fine writing build and build until you really can't imagine where the story will take you next.
The unexpectedness of it all, the overlying creepiness and the absolute manipulation of a cleverly orchestrated plot turn The Fear into one of those books that you simply can’t put down.
Be prepared to read until your eyes ache.
Be prepared to read until your eyes ache.
C.L. Taylor lives in Bristol with her partner and son. She started writing fiction in 2005 and her short stories have won several awards and have been published by a variety of literary and women’s magazines.
In 2014, The Bookseller named C.L. Taylor as one of the year’s Bestselling Adult Fiction Debut Authors for The Accident. The Lie and The Missing were Sunday Times top 10 bestsellers in paperback, and both books hit the #1 spot on the Kindle bestseller list. She has sold 1 million books to date.
Twitter @callytaylor #The Fear @AvonBooks
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