THE PERFECT OFFER

When struggling influencer couple Adele and Jack post a crowdfunding video online, they’re amazed when a mysterious benefactor offers to buy them a crumbling French chateau. It’s the lifeline they need to leave all their troubles behind.

THE PERFECT DREAM

For Adele, it’s a dream come true. She will post videos of the renovation as thousands of online subscribers follow their journey. But the chateau is not all it seems and the local community is far from welcoming.

THE PERFECT NIGHTMARE

Then Adele’s videos suddenly stop. Her sister Erin visits to make sure she’s OK, but the couple have vanished. Between the obsession of Adele’s fans and the claustrophobic secrecy of the nearby town, Erin must unravel the shocking truth behind the couple’s disappearance . . .

Adele is a Vlogger and lives with her now-unemployed partner Jack. Her mum has recently been diagnosed with cancer and she has a strained relationship with her sister Erin who disapproves of her lifestyle choice. She also likes to live beyond her means and dreams of owning a chateau in France.

One drunken night Adele releases a video asking people for help to buy her dream home. However, the video isn’t popular with the viewers. Until a mysterious person offers to gift the couple their dream home, but with strict conditions attached.

The Escape begins with Adele telling her followers a week before NYE that she is afraid of something in her isolated chateau. The story then moves to Erin who has travelled to France a week after NYE to find her sister, because their mum has been told her cancer is terminal and she hasn’t been able to get hold of Adele on the phone. She discovers that the chateau is empty and the local villagers won’t talk to her.

The plot is engrossing. You get the feeling from the off that something has happened to Adele and Jack, but what? Could it be something ghostly? as there is a supposed curse attached to the chateau. Have the locals, who disapproved of the couple, done something? What about one of Adele’s followers as they all know where she lives as she Vlogs about the chateau? Or the mysterious owner? There are lots of reasons why the couple could be missing, they could even have just left.

The story is told from Adele and Erin’s POV and before and after NYE. The pace was perfect, the jeopardy had me enthralled, and I swapped and changed my mind numerous times about what had occurred.

The Escape is a twisty, exciting thriller that is dark and tense for most of the story. To be perfectly honest I wasn’t really that bothered by what may have happened to Adele and Jack as I couldn’t stand either of them but I wanted Erin to find out the truth, and the truth she eventually does get!

Ruth Kelly is an award-winning journalist who has ghosted a string of Sunday Times top ten bestsellers – most recently THE PRISON DOCTOR, which sold over 250,000 copies, and THE GOVERNOR, which went straight in at number one on the Amazon charts and number five in the Sunday Times bestseller list.