Blog Tour : The Fear by C.L.Taylor

 ★★★☆☆

I want to thank Avon HQ for sending me this copy of The Fear and for including me on the blog tour. This hadn’t influenced my rating or review in any way. 

Synopsis 

The million copy Sunday Times bestseller returns with a taut, compelling psychological thriller that will have you glued to the edge of your seat. 

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…

About the author: 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.

My Thoughts on The Fear

I’m not an usual thriller reader, but I enjoy reading a good thriller book once in a while, this one had a slower start and I think if the pace was a bit quicker, I would have give it more stars, but this is just a personal preference. I kind of get into thriller/mystery books expecting the action to start quite fast.

The story was making it hard to like many characters because they were a bit unlikeable until the ending, they all did quite bad stuff, but I liked how when everything was resolved in the end, you could see that many of these characters had been redeemed because you understand their motivation, you can root for them to get their somewhat-happy ending.

What I adore about this book is how it destroyed girl-hate in every possible way, you start with these women who can’t seem to stand each other because of a man (it’s not a fighting for his affections kind of situation, it’s more complex than that) and then they work out their problems and become cordial. I loved that.

This story starts with Lou, who has been a victim of abuse when she was fifteen years old, she returns to her hometown only to discover that her abuser, Mike is now grooming another little girl. The police won’t listen to her, Chloe (the girl who’s now in a ‘relationship’ with Mike) wouldn’t either, so she kind of takes things in her hands.

I thought this book was very disturbing as you could see and understand the way Mike, who was a paedophile, could manipulate everybody, even the community into thinking he was a good man just because he did free hours of karate with children, because he took care of his mother while she was dying. I think we’ve all heard those things whenever there’s a real case on TV, how people who knew the abuser came forward with stories like ‘he was a good man, I don’t think he did that’ and so on. And I think this just proves how little attention we pay to the details and how prone we are to blame the victim instead (especially if it’s a child because they have a big imagination and could make up things) just because the white man seems to be a good person.

I liked Chloe a lot because of how smart she was, how she handled the whole thing. I applaud the author for mentioning therapy, I think she did pretty well with writing about such a difficult subject, I kept comparing what happened in the book with the real cases of pedophilia that I knew about and it felt real.

I think I have huge issues with Wendy, I’m not sure if her actions can be redeemed so easily, I’m not sure if she gained her happy-ending card, I understand that she somehow was a victim, she surely had some internalized mysogyny when it comes to Lou. But no, I’m not convinced that her actions were entirely caused by Mike’s manipulation.

All in all, I would recommend this book to all the thriller fans out there, who like character-focused books, because this book is really centered on what those characters are made of, what are their motivations, how they are going to influence each other and so on. It’s a very mind-blowing psychological thriller.

Follow the rest of the blog tour for this book 

 

Have you read any book by C.L.Taylor before? Are you going to check this one? 

Do you usually read thrillers? If so, what are some of your favourites?