I’m delighted to be taking part in the blog tour for I Dare You by Sam Carrington. Thank you to Sabah Khan at Avon for inviting me to take part. Before I tell you about Sam’s latest book, here’s the blurb.

The Blurb

AN INNOCENT GAME. A SHOCKING CRIME. A COMMUNITY FULL OF SECRETS.

Mapledon, 1989
Two little girls were out playing a game of dares. Only one returned home.
The ten-year-old told police what she saw: village loner Bill ‘Creepy’ Cawley dragged her friend into his truck and disappeared.
No body was found, but her testimony sent Cawley to prison for murder. An open and shut case, the right man behind bars.
The village could sleep safe once again.

Now…
Anna thought she had left Mapledon and her nightmares behind but a distraught phone call brings her back to face her past.
30 years ago, someone lied. 30 years ago, the man convicted wasn’t the only guilty party.
Now he’s out of prison and looking for revenge. The question is, who will he start with?

My Review

I’ve long been a fan of Sam Carrington’s books and I think there’s only one I haven’t read even though I’ve got it. I Dare You is a standalone novel and once more is set in the South West of the UK albeit a fictional village. And just as well! The residents of Mapledon are a strange bunch and definitely a bit toxic. You can’t blame Anna for getting out of there as fast as she could. It’s a place full of secrets and shame. But a hysterical phone call from her mother draws her back to her childhood home.

Lizzie, a journalist, has a personal reason for heading to Mapledon. She’s not searching for a scoop but the truth. Anna and Lizzie team up to find out what really happened thirty years before.

I loved this book. It’s told in two timelines with multiple voices. The clever thing with the past timeline set in 1989, is that it starts with the event and works backwards, looking at the lead-up to it. I’ve not seen this done before and it’s very effective. I enjoyed seeing how the motives for the crime came about. In the present timeline, there are very creepy incidents of parts of dolls being hammered to Anna’s mother’s front door. When a copy of the book was sent to me for review, it even came with it’s own doll’s arm. Freaky or what! Of course it’s a clue but who is doing such a thing to a woman close to 70? As much as Anna wants to leave and go home to her own daughter, she has to stay and look after her mother.

Setting the story in a village means it has similar principles to a murder mystery in an old house – cut-off location (black spots for mobile phones), small cast of people and a classic denouement – or so we think. I’m not going to give away anymore than that!

I loved the characters of Anna and Lizzie. Neither of them could fully trust the other so although they work together, there’s this wonderful tension between them that Sam Carrington pushes to the max.

Short chapters and twists and turns aplenty kept me reading late at night. I couldn’t always work out what was going to happen which kept me on my toes and thinking about it when I wasn’t reading. As I wrote earlier, I’ve read almost all of Sam Carrington’s books. For me, this is her best book so far. Bravo Sam!

You can buy I Dare You here.

The Author