‘Come A Little Closer’ by Rachel Abbott

Published by Black Dot Publishing,
13 February 2018.
ISBN: 978-1-9999437-0-7

There are some authors that when you see they have a new book out, you just know that you are in for a treat, and Rachel Abbott is one such author.

After a short but chilling prologue, we are taken back four weeks to meet Sharon, so looking forward to her forthcoming marriage. But Sharon does something silly…

The story is told by multiple narrators. The main narrator who is trying to free herself from an abusive husband is told in first person, and while you are privy to her life, she is not initially identified.  Far away two other women are trapped and wait silently for their time to die.

The discovery of the body of a scantily clad girl in a hide poses a question for DCI Tom Douglas.  Did she come here to commit suicide or was she murdered? Unable to accurately determine the cause of death or identify the body, and with about three hundred thousand people reported missing each year, and many about whom the authorities are not informed, Tom feels he is looking for a needle in a haystack.

There are several strands to this book and as the story develops so does the mystery of how these random people are linked.   In the main what they all have in common is the bad choices they have made.  The story is a scary reflection on how people can easily become victims manipulated by bad people when they are in a vulnerable state. This is a clever and ingeniously plotted mystery which gripped me from start to finish.

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Reviewer: Lizzie Sirett

Rachel Abbott was born just outside Manchester, England.   She became a systems analyst at the age of 21 in the early 1970s, and formed her own software company in the mid 1980s designing computer programmes for education.   The company expanded into all forms of interactive media and became extremely successful. The sale of the company in 2000 enabled her to take early retirement and fulfil one of her lifelong ambitions - to buy and restore a property in Italy.  Once there she completely restored a ruined monastery and started a second successful business renting it out for weddings and conferences. In 2010 she embarked on her third career and wrote her first book Only the Innocent.

www.rachel-abbott.com/