saving sophie

saving sophie

Blurb

A teenage girl is missing. Is your daughter involved, or is she next?

Your daughter is in danger. But can you trust her?

When Karen Finch’s seventeen-year-old daughter Sophie arrives home after a night out, drunk and accompanied by police officers, no one is smiling the morning after. But Sophie remembers nothing about how she got into such a state.

Twelve hours later, Sophie’s friend Amy has still not returned home. Then the body of a young woman is found.

Karen is sure that Sophie knows more than she is letting on. But Karen has her own demons to fight. She struggles to go beyond her own door without a panic attack.

As she becomes convinced that Sophie is not only involved but also in danger, Karen must confront her own anxieties to stop whoever killed one young girl moving on to another – Sophie.


Our Review

I will definitely look out for more of Sam Carrington’s work as it took me less than 24 hours to read this gripping tale.

17 year old Sophie Finch returns home from a night out with friends drunk and escorted by two policemen. The next morning Sophie can remember nothing past the early evening and has no idea how she got home or what happened to her friend.

Sophie’s friend Amy is reported missing the following morning and when a young woman’s body is discovered everyone wants to know what happened the night before, including Sophie.

Sophie’s mum Karen is concerned about Sophie but is battling her own demons after an attack which left her with severe agoraphobia meaning she was too scared to leave the house.

I was hooked on this book before the end of the prologue and not just because I am a fan of prologues in books. This prologue gripped my attention from the start making me wonder who the girl was being gagged and who it was holding her.

Our first introduction to Sophie is in a chapter from Karen’s point of view when two police officers walk in with “a bedraggled mess of a girl.” Sophie was found by police men walking along the main road on her own with no sign of her friends.

When Karen looks at Sophie she knows something is wrong, she can see it in her eyes. “Sophie stared blankly ahead, her eyes unfamiliar. The bright blue eyes she knew so well were dark; void of emotion. But a mother could see the scared young girl behind them. This wasn’t the fallout of too much alcohol.”

Karen and Mike argue when Karen says she thinks Sophie was drugged. We learn Karen was attacked almost two years previously and via Mike the reader begins to question whether this is making Karen paranoid and overprotective. This is an image which is not helped later by her harassment of Sophie’s friends and her lack of respect for Sophie’s privacy.

The tension in Karen and Mike’s marriage is visible and there seems to be a lot of hostility and resentment floating about, emotions which are not hidden particularly well from their daughter.

I loved the sensitive way the author deals with Karen’s agoraphobia and possible reactions to it. I find things like that fascinating and think this was a fantastic addition to the story. It also added a depth to her character and made her vulnerable and thus more likeable. I particularly felt for her in the times when she tries to leave the house to comfort Rachel.

Sophie has a tight-knit group of friends who hang around together on a regular basis. Erin is Karen’s goddaughter and Sophie’s best friend since childhood who has recently been pushed to one side since Sophie met Amy.

Sophie met Amy at work. She is a few years older and loves being the center of attention as much as possible. Sophie describes her as “easily the most popular girl in the group.” To me she comes across as a bit selfish and annoying.

“Amy, being older, had come on the scene later, after school, and had kind of replaced Erin; becoming Sophie’s new best friend. That had never sat well with Erin.”

Dan comes across as a bit creepy and it is obvious that he has a thing about Sophie despite her only liking him as a friend.

As the story evolves we get to find out more about the friendship groups and about Karen as well as learning more about Sophie’s memory problems.

I love the way this book unfolds and had me constantly questioning everything, such as who is stalking Sophie and what do they want, and what have her friends got to hide?

This was a brilliantly tangled story which left me wanting more.

Our Final Rating...

Our Rating

  • Currently 4/5

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