Great story, slow progression
"I don't know where I am. I've been kidnapped and am being held prisoner by a strange man. I'm afraid he'll kill me."
Book: Dear Amy
Author: Helen Callaghan
Reviewed by: Samantha Keogh
Review made possible by: Penguin Random House South Africa
“Dear Amy,
“I don’t know where I am. I’ve been kidnapped and am being held prisoner by a strange man. I’m afraid he’ll kill me.
“Please help soon.
“Bethan Avery”
This is the tag introducing a “first class psychological suspense from a major new voice in fiction,” according to the press release which prompted me to read the book.
However, while the main plot is very good, with interesting twists you won’t see coming, there is an awful lot of waffle running through the story.
Margot Lewis is a teacher at a local school who moonlights as an agony aunt, Amy, for the local Cambridge newspaper.
While her teaching job isn’t all that interesting, her after hours gig gets a whole lot more intense, and dangerous, when she is sent two letters, pleading for help, from a teenage girl who was abducted 20 years ago.
When she takes these letters to the police they dismiss her in the belief the letters are a prank as the abducted girl, Bethan, was presumed dead shortly after she was taken.
However, when a don at Cambridge gets in contact, things start to heat up and the pursuit is on to verify the letters (they are real) and find the missing girl, now a woman, before it is too late to save the kidnapper’s latest victim – one of Margot’s students.
If you can make it through the sub-plots, which add nothing to the main story, the plot will keep you enthralled, especially in the last 100 pages.
