Blog Tour: The Method

Ooooh! Another blog tour!!

The Method

Imagine a helpless, pregnant 16-year-old who’s just been yanked from the serenity of her home and shoved into a dirty van. Kidnapped Alone Terrified.

Now forget her

Picture instead a pregnant, 16-year-old, manipulative prodigy. She is shoved into a dirty van and, from the first moment of her kidnapping, feels a calm desire for two things: to save her unborn son and to exact merciless revenge. 

She is methodical calculating scientific in her plotting. A clinical sociopath? Leaving nothing to chance, secure in her timing and practice, she waits for the perfect moment to strike. 

The Method  is what happens when the victim is just as cold as the captors. 

I know, right?! Sounds excellent. And it was really really good, I liked it a whole lot. I couldn’t wait to start it and then I couldn’t wait to finish it….and that sounds bad, like I didn’t like it. I did like it. What I mean I think is that I couldn’t put it down. I was so hooked, because this is such a unique take on your usual thriller. I have never read an abduction story like this and isn’t that a pretty cool thing to be able to say as a writer – that your book is like no other.. It’s so clever and so inspired to have a victim that also kind of isn’t actually willing to be a victim at all. So clever.

 The story is pretty horrible – I mean these kidnappers are absolutely not good guys and what they plan to do with this sixteen year old girl and her unborn baby. Well, let’s just say it’s absolutely not fun times in any way shape or form. It’s horrible because blond haired blue eyed babies? They’re worth something. This mother though, 16 and grabbed on her way to school, she’s not letting her baby go without a fight. & that’s what makes her so excellent I think: the fact that she is absolutely not prepared to just lie down and accept her fate. She’s bad ass and as her story unravels in this book that is nothing if not multi layered I couldn’t help but be kind of proud of her, of her drive, her ability to distance herself from the horror of her situation, her determination not to be beaten. It’s kind of like…have you watched Dexter? It’s like that.

It’s something you don’t get to see all that often also, the sociopath as the victim, and I loved it.

We’ve got a split narrative going on here too, which I am pretty much always a fan of – that of our victim (telling her story 17 years later, which is an interesting exercise in foreshadowing: we know she survives but there’s so much else going on, this book is so full of twists and turns that you want to keep reading because knowing she gets out isn’t enough: you need to know how) and the FBI agent who is trying to save her (I enjoyed him a little less to be honest, I don’t know why really, I just kind of didn’t connect with him the same and I was so hung up on what was going on in that room that time spent with the FBI just felt a little bit like time wasted. Minor niggle though, and I totally get that it was a story that needed to be told alongside and it did totally work. I just liked the other parts better and I’m allowed to pick favourites, right?)

It’s such a clever exploration of fear too – because fear plays games with your mind and I liked how this book took that and turned it on its head a little bit, let the fear make you stronger not weaker and maybe there’s some kind of life lesson in there also you know?

In short, liked it – I like the originality, and the clever unravelling and the red herrings. I liked the characters and I liked that I never knew quite what was happening or where it was going. This is a book that is absolutely worth a read.