Friend Request

Goodreads Description

When Louise first notices the new girl who has mysteriously transferred late into their senior year, Maria seems to be everything the girls Louise hangs out with aren't. Authentic. Funny. Brash. Uncensored and unapologetic. Days into their acquaintance, Maria and Louise are quickly on their way to becoming fast friends. Decades later, when Maria reaches out over social media, Louise's heart nearly stops. Long-buried memories quickly rise to the surface--those first days of their budding connection, the awful judgment of the young women who felt at the time like her sole gateway to belonging. The fateful, tragic night that would change all their lives forever. Her entire adult life, Louise has known if the truth ever came out, she could stand to lose everything. Her job. Her son. Her freedom. Maria's sudden reemergence threatens it all, and forces Louise to reconnect with everyone she'd severed ties with to get away from the past. Trying to piece together exactly what happened that night, she soon discovers there's much she didn't know. The only certainty is that Maria Weston disappeared that night, never to be heard from again--until now.

My Review

In general, I'm a person who's never been a massive fan of social media...except for Facebook, oh Facebook...now that's another matter totally. Until fairly recently I didn't even know how Twitter worked, and actually, I'm still a novice at it. Instagram, well yes, I've learnt how to use it, but again, only recently. And I don't use it very often. As for Facebook, well I'm on it every day.

This is one of the reasons that I loved this book so much. It touched on a topic that I know about, a product that I use, and a social media platform that has been a part of my daily life for a long time now. This book very clearly shows just how little privacy us Facebook users actually have. And it's a book that will make you rush off and check your privacy setting the minute you finish reading it.

Louise, a single mother of one young son, quit the corporate world a few years ago to start her own business, allowing her to work from home where she can spend more time with her son. She doesn't have a lot of friends, and is a bit of a loner. But, she does like to check her Facebook page now and then. Until the day when she receives a friend request from an old school friend...but the friend died many years ago. And so starts this fantastic thriller.

As most of you know, I'm a fan of dual timeline plots. In this book, the dual timelines take place in 2016, when Louise is a 40-something adult, and 1989 when she's a scholar just finishing high school. When it comes to dual timeline plots, I tend to find that I'm more of a fan of one time period than the other. But in this book, I really enjoyed both timelines equally, or just about equally. I think I perhaps favoured the chapters set in the past slightly, but I was still gripped by the events of the current time.

This is a thriller that moves at pace, the writing style is easy and it's the type of book that you can pick up and read anywhere, anytime as it doesn't require tons of concentration. I thoroughly enjoyed this one, and although it's not a book with lots of twists and turns, it's a solid thriller.

My Rating: * * * *

Publication Date: August 2017 (South Africa)

Genre: Suspense Thriller

Format: Trade Paperback

Source: Review copy received from the publisher. Many thanks to author, Laura Marshall and Jonathan Ball Publishers in SA for my copy.