‘The Summer Dare’ by Joanna Dodd

Published by Canelo Hera Books,
11 July 2024.
ISBN: 978-1-80436-842-8 (PB)

Some childhood and teenage friendships fade away when life intervenes, and everyone goes their separate way. Others last into adulthood, held together by – what? Geography? Mutual interests? Or something darker: a long-held secret, perhaps?

Maddie, Hayley, Claire, Jenna and Lucy were members of the cool crowd at school. Well, maybe not Lucy, two years younger and a newcomer to the area, but the others took pity on her. Especially Maddie, the self-styled leader of their little group. Twenty-five years later four of them are still close and have formed a WhatsApp group calling themselves the FabFour. But Maddie hasn’t been seen since they were teenagers. She disappeared during a summer camp, and an extensive police investigation failed to turn up any trace of her.

Then Lucy starts to receive strange, vaguely threatening texts from an unknown number. And she thinks she’s being followed. And there’s something very important that they never told anyone about the night Maddie went missing, not even the police. Especially not the police.   

The FabFour set out to track down the sender of the texts, and it soon emerges that theirs is not the only longstanding secret. Joanna Dodd sends them down a twisty, multi-timeline path, and creates a vivid picture of complex adult relationships and even more tortuous teenage ones. As women, the four are almost like grown-up Spice Girls – a sporty one, a clever one, a shy one and a bold one. As teenagers they are still feeling their way, all but confident Maddie, who knows exactly what she wants and goes all out to get it, and ironically is the one who meets a sticky end. Or does she...?

The other characters – parents, spouses, people involved in the original investigation – all come to life too; there’s a real sense of ordinary people trying to get on with ordinary life after something huge crashed through it. It all helps create the tension that pulled them all together in the past and still pervades everything in the present. Maddie’s disappearance has always hovered in the background, because when a question like that remains unanswered, it never goes away.

The ending is as shocking as it is inevitable, and Joanna Dodd leaves a tantalizing loose end – not to make room for a sequel, but to let the reader decide what happened next.

So, what did happen to Maddie? There’s only one way to find out – read her story.
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Joanna Dodd is fascinated by toxic friendship and family groups and the long shadows cast by old secrets. She lives in London and enjoys acting in plays, running very slowly, and spending time with her (lovely and not at all toxic) family and friends. She’s wanted to be a crime writer since she became addicted to Murder She Wrote as a teenager (although her real-life sleuthing skills are probably not quite as honed as Jessica Fletcher’s). When she’s not writing crime fiction, she also loves reading it!

 

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives in Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.