Tess Stimson – Stolen

‘Stolen’ by Tess Stimson is a psychological thriller with a fantastic plot that is really an edge of your seat kinda book.

You thought she was safe. You were wrong…

Alex knows her daughter would never wander off in a strange place. So when her three-year-old vanishes from an idyllic beach wedding, Alex immediately believes the worst.
The hunt for Lottie quickly becomes a worldwide search, but it’s not long before suspicion falls on her mother. Why wasn’t she watching Lottie?
Alex knows she’s not perfect, but she loves her child. And with all eyes on her, Alex fears they’ll never uncover the truth unless she takes matters into her own hands.

Who took Lottie Martini? And will she ever come home?

This fabulous thriller is mainly told from Alexa’s point of view and we see how she feels right from the start. A human rights lawyer and single parent to Lottie she does admit that she does love Lottie but has found bonding a struggle. The fact her daughter disappears plunges her into the nightmare no parent ever wants to experience and she enters a horrific complex world of missing children, politics, paedophiles, the dark web and facing judgement from every form of the media and faceless trolls on the internet. As time passes, Alexa is that desperate she starts her own search to find her daughter. A search that will mentally push her to the edge and cause her to be suspicious of everyone in her life, including her own family. Alexa has people close to her who are not who they seem to be but would any of them have been involved with Lottie going missing?

A story that I see has similarities with the McCann’s nightmare and that is scary enough for me as a mother. An emotional rollercoaster, an anguished mother, a missing child and everything in between. I was hooked from the prologue and with such a sensitive subject the tension was almost palpable and I was blaming almost everyone, even Alexa at times. She is a weird character at first, not one of the most likeable I have ‘met’, but as the story unfolds and her sheer dogged determination is apparent my opinion changed.

Quinn is a character who is a journalist and no, she isn’t exactly problem free but she becomes obsessed with this child abduction story and we do have to see her determination shine through in the chapters told from her point of view.

A book that is astonishingly good and as I said tense enough to keep you wondering if Alexa will ever see Lottie again. If you love a thriller that is binge-worthy try this!

Thanks to Rachel’s Random Resources and Avon Books for my copy of Stolen.