Follow Me
by Kathleen Barber
From the author of Truth Be Told (formerly titled Are You Sleeping)—now an Apple TV series of the same name—comes a cautionary tale of oversharing in the social media age for fans of Jessica Knoll and Caroline Kepnes’s You.
Everyone wants new followers…until they follow you home.
Audrey Miller has an enviable new job at the Smithsonian, a body by reformer Pilates, an apartment door with a broken lock, and hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers to bear witness to it all. Having just moved to Washington, DC, Audrey busies herself impressing her new boss, interacting with her online fan base, and staving off a creepy upstairs neighbor with the help of the only two people she knows in town: an ex-boyfriend she can’t stay away from and a sorority sister with a high-powered job and a mysterious past.
But Audrey’s faulty door may be the least of her security concerns. Unbeknownst to her, her move has brought her within striking distance of someone who’s obsessively followed her social media presence for years—from her first WordPress blog to her most recent Instagram Story. No longer content to simply follow her carefully curated life from a distance, he consults the dark web for advice on how to make Audrey his and his alone. In his quest to win her heart, nothing is off-limits—and nothing is private.
With “compelling, suspenseful” (Liz Nugent) prose, Kathleen Barber’s electrifying new thriller will have you scrambling to cover your webcam and digital footprints.
Momma Says: 3 stars⭐⭐⭐
Follow Me had a great premise, but for me, the idea of this one was better than the reality. I don't need to like the characters to enjoy the story, but it does help when I don't want to pinch the main character's head off myself. Audrey irritated me to no end. She suffers from a major case of it's all about me syndrome, which isn't helped by the pedestal the author puts her on. What I mean by that is we're expected to believe that all these men are falling for this thoroughly self-centered woman - not just her stalker but nearly every man she comes in contact with. Plus people just drop everything to run to Audrey when she needs something. It's like no one has a life in this story except the annoying damsel in distress. That brings me to the identity of her stalker, which isn't revealed until close to the end of the book. Kathleen Barber does give us a fair amount of red herrings to consider, but in all honesty, I didn't like Audrey enough to care who the stalker was. In fact, I was surprised that a couple of people didn't at least attempt to take her out before the stalker had a chance to reveal himself. Not that the rest of the characters were much better. In the end, I don't think there were really any characters that I particularly liked in this one.
At the end of the day, what it really comes down to isn't whether the characters were likable or not. It's more about whether this mystery/thriller kept those pages turning. I will say that I finished the book, but that was more out of sheer determination than any real curiosity about the stalker's identity or how it would all play out. There was too much of the mundane and not enough tension for it to be what I would consider a thriller. That said, there was a decent twist at the end, but when it happened I wasn't thinking 'wow, I can't believe that happened.' Instead, I was thinking that I couldn't believe it took that long for that character to go off the deep end.
Maybe this just wasn't the book for me, which is quite possible. I do realize that I'm in the minority on this one, but I really expected more, and just didn't find it here.
❃❃ARC courtesy of NetGalley and Gallery Books
Follow Me had a great premise, but for me, the idea of this one was better than the reality. I don't need to like the characters to enjoy the story, but it does help when I don't want to pinch the main character's head off myself. Audrey irritated me to no end. She suffers from a major case of it's all about me syndrome, which isn't helped by the pedestal the author puts her on. What I mean by that is we're expected to believe that all these men are falling for this thoroughly self-centered woman - not just her stalker but nearly every man she comes in contact with. Plus people just drop everything to run to Audrey when she needs something. It's like no one has a life in this story except the annoying damsel in distress. That brings me to the identity of her stalker, which isn't revealed until close to the end of the book. Kathleen Barber does give us a fair amount of red herrings to consider, but in all honesty, I didn't like Audrey enough to care who the stalker was. In fact, I was surprised that a couple of people didn't at least attempt to take her out before the stalker had a chance to reveal himself. Not that the rest of the characters were much better. In the end, I don't think there were really any characters that I particularly liked in this one.
At the end of the day, what it really comes down to isn't whether the characters were likable or not. It's more about whether this mystery/thriller kept those pages turning. I will say that I finished the book, but that was more out of sheer determination than any real curiosity about the stalker's identity or how it would all play out. There was too much of the mundane and not enough tension for it to be what I would consider a thriller. That said, there was a decent twist at the end, but when it happened I wasn't thinking 'wow, I can't believe that happened.' Instead, I was thinking that I couldn't believe it took that long for that character to go off the deep end.
Maybe this just wasn't the book for me, which is quite possible. I do realize that I'm in the minority on this one, but I really expected more, and just didn't find it here.
❃❃ARC courtesy of NetGalley and Gallery Books
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