Please Help Me by Gytha Lodge – Thriller Book Review

A fun, well-paced thriller that had me hooked – I read it in less than 24 hours!

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Sadie is a teenage girl on holiday with her family who receives an anonymous Airdrop from someone who claims they have been kidnapped and the parents they are there with are not their real parents. We also have Amanda, a detective on holiday there with her son, who is drawn into the case alongside someone she once partnered with and has a tangled history with. With the list of suspects narrowed down, can they figure out what’s going on before it’s too late?

The only issue I had was that it didn’t seem all that believable. I can follow all the trains of thought saying that the police need to carefully track down the person who might be kidnapped, not alert them or the kidnappers to anything strange, and potentially use a decoy – but having a random teenage girl be that person and allowing her to get herself tangled up in it just seemed a step just a little too far for me!

Nevertheless, it made for an excellent story that had me gripped throughout. While I was making guesses left, right and centre about which one the girl was, what was going on, I did hit on a couple of the twists early on, whereas others I had an inkling that someone might be involved, but it turned out they weren’t quite in the way I expected – for example, certain characters seemed to have more appearances early on than the aside thoughts that a teenage girl would give them.

The holiday vibe was spot on. It captured the hotel resort feel of being in a little bubble outside of your everyday life so well – we really had quite little background on any of the characters’ lives before the trip, and it felt like that bubble burst at the end. It was claustrophobic and addictive.

Read more book reviews like Please Help Me:

• The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer – Horror Thriller Review
• One of the Family by Mark Edwards – Thriller Book Review
• The Night Stairs by Erin Kelly – Dark Academia Thriller Book Review

I loved this book for an easy read after a thicker, heavier fantasy book – would definitely recommend it!

Thank you to Netgalley, the author and the publishers for a copy of this book.