‘THE MESSAGE HAS DISAPPEARED.
SO HAS YOUR BEST FRIEND…
You receive a text from your best friend:
Can’t speak… don’t text or call… pls just come
But as you race to her house,
the message is deleted.
She answers the door, insists everything’s fine.
She says she never sent a message.
Something’s not right, but what can you do?
Six hours later, the police call.
There’s blood all over your friend’s house.
She’s missing.
And you were the last person to see her alive . . .’ (Synopsis courtesy of Amazon UK.)
K.L. Slater has written over 20 psychological thrillers, yet Message Deleted was the first one I’ve read. I saw some great reviews online for this one and the synopsis definitely piqued my interest so I quickly got myself a copy.
This is a novel I was immediately gripped by. The story begins strong with Saffy waiting for a job interview when she receives a concerning text message from her best friend Leona asking her to come over. Of course Saffy goes to her, but when the text message disappears and Leona herself denies all knowledge of sending this it’s clear something strange is going on. When Leona and her family subsequently go missing, it seems Saffy is the last person to have seen them and subsequently all eyes are on her. So where is Leona and her family and who is responsible?
The suspense of what happened to Leona and her family was sustained well throughout the novel and there were several twists and turns particularly in the closing chapters. I didn’t predict the outcome or who was involved and that’s always a sign of clever writing. In particular I think it helped that Saffy’s character is written in a way which certainly made me feel she could be an unreliable narrator at times – as readers we are given hints to trauma she and her family have experienced, but without going into much detail until key moments of the story, and this certainly helped the narrative in my opinion.
I wouldn’t particularly say I warmed to the characters as such, I don’t think I was meant to, and this kept me guessing as to who was involved and why. The fact that I didn’t have any strong feelings for any character, I didn’t feel particularly emotionally attached, yet I was still gripped by the story is again testament to the writing, I simply had to find out what had happened!
Yes I had some frustrations with elements of the story, the fixation of the investigation on Saffy when it didn’t seem apparent why; the convenience of some of the encounters between characters, and the choices some of the characters made, but I still thoroughly enjoyed this novel.
I read this book within a couple of days, the chapters are short and punchy and it was always tempting to read just one more, and then just one more. This worked for me and I am definitely keen to read further novels by K.L. Slater!
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