Published By: Cahill Davis
Pages: 285
Released On: 08/05/2026
Jed Thomas has worked hard to rebuild his life after the tragic loss of his fiancée. Now remarried, he has a respected job as a PE teacher, loyal friends, and what looks like the perfect life.
But behind closed doors, Jed is hiding a painful secret. Just as he begins to contemplate a way out, a new danger emerges.
A fifteen-year-old pupil has become fixated on him, her behaviour crossing lines that cannot be uncrossed. When Jed reports her actions, no one believes him. Then, on a friend’s stag night, things spiral out of control.
Jed finds himself accused of a crime he didn’t commit. Betrayed by someone he once trusted, he’s arrested and publicly disgraced. His reputation is shattered. He’s alone, discredited and running out of options.
But the worst is yet to come.
As lives unravel and truths come to light, Jed is forced to confront just how far obsession, betrayal and revenge can go. His world is about to implode. And not everyone will survive the fallout.
*****
Thanks to Cassandra at Cahill Davis for my gifted copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I own a couple of Simpson’s books but haven’t read them yet, but seeing as I’ve only seen universal praise for her writing, I jumped at the chance to read her new standalone offering.
It’s so descriptive. You don’t have to struggle through it. You know straight away who’s who, what they look like, how they act, the environment, the situation everyone’s in etc. It means you don’t have to spend your energy thinking, you can just lose yourself in the story.
It’s not a very long book which means it’s quick to read, and because it’s fast paced, it means it zooms by. But you don’t feel shortchanged.
It made me feel quite uncomfortable reading it, but not in a bad way. It had this quiet tension, where you’re never sure what’s going on, always looking after your shoulder, scared to turn the page. I think that’s more effective than a loud explicit thrill.
There is this power dynamic in Jed’s family – how to say this without spoiling things – this power dynamic that we’ve seen so often in thrillers but it’s turned on its head in this book. The characters are not necessarily who we think they are, which was interesting to read.
It’s also quite frightening. Not in a horror sense. But this thing between Jed and his student. This discomfort, it’s like a car crash, you don’t want to look at it but you can’t look away.
My only complaint, and that might be more to do with the formatting of my e-arc I don’t know, but I’d have liked more obvious breaks between scenes, because wheat I read is you would get a scene in a classroom say, but then the next paragraph is set somewhere else but it hasn’t specified that. It’s not a big thing, and nothing to affect my enjoyment of the story, but in regards to being honest, I must mention it.
I’ll definitely be moving her other books up my TBR list after this. It was uncomfortable to read, tense, with multi-layered characters. She said it’s different to her previous books but as I haven’t read those, I had nothing to compare it to. But her talent for character creation and storytelling is clear to see.
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