I really liked KL Slaters first Novel Safe With Me and have really been looking forward to reading this one.
I was not to be disappointed, Its a cracker of a read.KL Slater has a great skill of being able to write fantastically messed up leading characters, in fact all her characterizations are spot on for me. I wanted to shake Toni on many occasions and run away from a few other of the characters. The Chapters are written in alternating timelines and multiple perspectives that moves along at a good pace that leaves your mind flipping back and forth as to who did what to who, there are enough Red Herrings to stock the fish counter at Tescos.

Its a book so obviously you have to suspend belief and isn't that a big reason for reading? escaping the drudgery of real life for a few hours at a time? Or is that just me?

A great read and highly recommended.

Blink was a fast-paced and gripping psychological thriller (I know I said I would take a break, but I had this already) that didn't only manage to keep me addicted for three hours straight but also pulled off a twist I kind of predicted but loved anyway.

This is the story of Toni, a young mother of a five-year-old whose husband died in the war. We know that in the present, her daughter has been gone for some time and no one knows where she is. However, most of the action takes place three years before and we get to discover what lead to Evie's disappearance.

Blink is a classic psychological thriller where you can't help but suspect everyone. I even suspected one of the main characters and later felt bad because of my evil thoughts. I won't say that this is the most surprising book I've ever read, but it was definitely better than my last thrillers and I believe my fellow bloggers would really enjoy it. Even though I suspected the "twist" I was wrong about the "who" and I quite liked how it all came to an end.

As for the points of view, my favorite was "The Teacher", as it was incredibly creepy and fascinating. I couldn't believe how someone could say those things and get away with it. Toni was a fairly typical main character and, as it usually happens, her issue with sleeping pills drove me crazy.

All in all, I'd recommend this tense thriller to fans of psychological books. It will keep you on the edge of your seat and will probably surprise you in more than one way. A clever and addictive read.

4.5 stars.
Well, this book had me running around all over the place trying to work out what was going on. So much so, I was near exhausted when I finished it! Just when I thought I had it worked out, along came another curve ball that had me racing off in a whole other direction; kept me on my toes throughout! But then I should have expected this as it was the same for this author's previous book, Safe With Me, which I thoroughly loved. Having said that, the clues were all there throughout, the author being rather good at misdirection, hindsight being a wonderful thing in retrospect!
Toni is having a fresh start. Following the death of her husband, she has moved herself and her young daughter, Evie, to live nearer to her mum. Not a move she really feels comfortable with but, given her circumstances, a necessary one. Leaving their old friends behind, Evie starts a new school and Toni begins work in an Estate Agents as the two of them try to embrace their new future. These two things introduce a cast of rather interesting characters, all of whom come across as potential suspects into what happens next. Toni herself is struggling more than she wants to admit and, to be honest, takes her eye right off the ball and her actions lead to the main storyline, the disappearance of Evie.
The story flits between the past and the present, several years on with the two timelines converging at the end. This is done very well with just the right amount of information being injected at the right time to make the story flow well. And then we have some diary entries which add a whole different layer into the mix.
The characters were, on the whole, well crafted, although I do have to say that there were probably too many suspects, surely no one can be as unlucky as to have encountered so many dubious people in such a short space of time which did annoy me a little. Sometimes it did feel a little overwhelming and about half way through I gave up trying to second guess everything which was a bit of a shame as I do like to try and work things out myself. About half way through I decided to just let the author take me where she wanted me to go. I was completely in her power.
The ending, when we got to the crux of it all, was mostly satisfying. It made sense and, with hindsight, worked but I still wasn't completely sated. I am not sure why exactly. Maybe it was all the red herrings, misdirection and curve balls I had to go through to get there. I don't know. Maybe I felt a little cheated. Maybe the cast of suspects was too big for me, too many people for me to juggle along the way that I dropped all the balls too soon. Don't get me wrong. I love twists and turns, secrets and lies, misdirection, all that stuff, I just think that maybe it was too busy for me. That said, it was a new spin on the old missing child story. It was unique in narrative and did keep my attention mostly throughout so I can't knock it that much. It definitely hasn't put me off reading more from the author in the future. I'll just be forearmed next time.

My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

I don’t even know where to start with this book.
I want to take it and scream from the rooftops. I want to make everyone I know read a copy. I want to knock on doors and leave this book in mailboxes.

If you can’t tell, I LOVED Blink by K.L Slater.

Enthralling, fast-paced and dark, Blink provided all the elements I need to be sucked completely into a book. I read this one into the night, I left the book open on my bed so I could try and absorb more as I slept.

The novels I end up loving the most have alternating narrators whose plots blend together effortlessly: Blink does exactly that. The novel opens with a woman narrating in a coma. She is unable to move but can hear and process everything. People are discussing turning her ventilator off. She cannot tell them she is there. All she can do is relive, over and over, when Evie went missing. Flash back three years; Toni is raising her daughter Evie alone after her husband died in active duty in Afghanistan. Coping with pills, Toni is doing the best she can to piece her life back together. A teacher’s aide, Harriet, narrates sections as she manipulates little Evie. All of these seemingly unrelated tales collide with a bang, and when they do, hold on to your seats!

Nothing is what it seems in Blink; if you want a hair-raising thriller, then look no further. Blink is a must read. 5/5 stars.

Three years ago, five-year-old Evie Cotter disappeared from school. With no evidence or eyewitnesses, the police are at a complete standstill in their investigation, not even knowing if the child is dead or alive. Toni, Evie’s mum, blames herself – if only she’d paid more attention to what was going on around her. Convinced that her child is still alive, she knows that she must do anything possible to get Evie back…

Told in two timeframes, the present day and three years ago, Blink tells the story of a woman who is spiralling out of control after the death of her husband. At times, I wanted to shake Toni and tell her to trust her instincts – she knew that someone was messing with her head but put it all down to paranoia. From the start, it was obvious that someone close to home was involved, but with so many people in the frame, it was impossible to work out who it was. The author throws in enough red herrings to muddy the waters and keep you guessing right until the end. One of the things I liked about this book was the number of characters. Too often, a book can become confusing with too many characters, but the author has the balance just right.

The cover of the book states that Blink is ‘a psychological thriller with a killer twist’, and I do admit that I spent a lot of the book trying to work out what the twist was! Without giving anything away, I am pleased to say that I did work out part of what was going to happen, but not all of it, which definitely added to my enjoyment of the plot.

For me, a sign of a good book is one that cannot be put down and I managed to read this in less than a day. Written in short chapters, K L Slater has ensured that the plot of Blink moves rapidly to the point where you just want to read one more chapter before putting it down!

A must-read!

Sometimes when you start reading a book you quickly find out who is responsible for what and how the book is going to end and sometimes you also work out the twist very early on in the book.
With Blink you will be surprised because you think that you know what is going to happen but you don't know, not really. The book jumps between what is currently happening and what happened 3 years ago. Blink keeps you guessing and wondering how it is going to end.
This is really a gripping psychological thriller with a main character that has some flaws and who is trying and struggling to work through her grief after her husbands death. I would recommend this book to all lovers of psychological thrillers.
Thank you to Bookouture and Netgalley for the copy

After reading Safe With Me I was really looking forward to this. That book obsessed me for 24 hours when I should have been working/sleeping/eating etc. And it was the same this time. I was hooked. The thing is there's a "but" coming.......But it did kind of let me down in the climax. It was just too predictable In general this is a tense and quite frightening story (especially as a sometimes scatty mother of a five year old). But (there it is again) I was expecting to be suprised much more. I worked out quite easily who the "baddie"was, and their motives. There were red herrings galore but they were too heavy handed and so never really tricked me.
But (and its a good but this time) it was a quick and really enjoyable read. I liked and empathised with Toni, a mother drowning in grief and making bad decisions to try and cope. There was an underlying story of addiction which I felt might have made a better story than the kidnap. Also the whole family dynamic of Toni, her daughter Edie and mother Anita is well written, the relationships seem realistic.

A very readable and pacy thriller, well worth a read.

Thank you Netgalley and Bookouture this ARC.

Three year ago, Toni little daughter disappeared from school, no body knows what happen.
The story is told in past and present day . In the present we see women in hospital , who can't move ,but she feels and sees everything( she locked in after stroke). In the past we are gathering the pieces to what happen before Evie disappeared . It gave me sense of dread from begining , knowing that something will happen , but you can't stop it. There was diary entries in between which took me to different conclusions.

I disliked Toni from the first page, but I understood why she became this messed up women, her life was shattered.She couldn't use her judgment and couldn't think clearly because of....( I don't want to spoil it), but I found it difficult to excuse her actions.
The story had slow build up, but by the middle it gets very interesting. Every body become suspect, and you start to analysis other people actions.

The end was shocking, I didn't expect this. But it was sad ending.

This book caught my attention from the very beginning. I loved the back and forth from past to present day. It was a great thriller that had me guessing and completely surprised by the end. Can't wait to read more from this author!

Blink - that's what the woman lying in a hospital ward in a coma is trying to do. She needs to tell them she is still alive inside her unresponsive body before her life support is turned off. Memories are coming back to her, memories that she desperately needs to tell someone.

Three years earlier Toni Cotter and her five year old daughter Evie moved to her mother's town hoping to make a fresh start after the sudden death of her husband fighting in Afghanistan. With a new job, Evie unhappy at a new school and still mourning her husband, Toni has trouble coping and occassionally pops a sedative to help her get through the day. Matters come to ahead when Toni is late to pick Evie up from school one day and when she gets there Evie is nowhere to be found.

The full story is revealed slowly in this gripping mystery with Toni remembering back to the past and trying to work out who could have taken Evie. There are several suspects and K.L Slater artfully makes us distrust them all. However, there are unexpected twists and shocks that will take you by surprise. A very suspenseful page turner.

A young widow. A missing child. An unknown woman in a coma. A troubled teacher. How are these people linked?

After the tragic death of her husband whilst on active duty in Afghanistan, young mother Toni Cotter tries her best to raise her 5-year old daughter Evie on her own. As if things were not difficult enough, the pair has to move to a new neighbourhood in order to be able to afford paying the bills and to be closer to Toni’s mother, leaving their friends and support network behind. With their old life gone up in flames, Toni struggles psychologically with the aftermath of grief and the burden of responsibility of being a single parent, relying on sedatives to make it through each day. Evie is having trouble settling into her new school, her once cheerful personality giving way to moodiness and anxiety. When Toni starts a part-time job to make ends meet, she is forced to rely on her mother’s help to pick Evie up from school some afternoons. One day Toni receives a call from the hospital that her mother has had a fall and sustained some serious injuries. Caught up in traffic on the way to the school to pick Evie up herself, Toni is running late. When she finally gets there, the school gates are locked, and a mother’s worst nightmare has come true - Evie is gone.

In a hospital bed lies a woman in a coma who is being kept alive by machines. Noone knows who she is, and she has long been given up for dead. But deep inside her unresponsive body, her mind is very much alive and alert, and she is silently crying out for help. If she could only blink her eyes ...

I loved the premise of the story – a mystery revolving around a woman with locked-in-syndrome, a neurological disorder causing the paralysis of all voluntary muscles but retaining intact cognitive function. Trapped like a prisoner in her own body, this person may have the answer to the secret but is unable to communicate. It sounded really intriguing! However, reading it as a trained health professional there were too many holes as big as bear traps in this story to make it believable. I certainly won’t spoil it for anyone, but personally I found it hard to suspend disbelief enough to make it through some chapters without rolling my eyes, and this really ruined the read for me.

As for “the killer twist you’ll never forget”: does this have to be announced prominently on the cover? Knowing that as a reader you need to question everything you read takes the fun out of the journey, and makes every false lead stand out like a giraffe in a crowd of zebras. There are plenty of red herrings thrown into this story, sometimes with the subtlety of a wet fish slapping you in the face. Admittedly, one worked for me. The others didn’t. Some characters seemed to appear only with the purpose of leading the reader down the garden path, and were never heard from again after that, which is a shame, when so much effort was being invested in them originally. For me, a “twist” is a clever manipulating of the story rather than a complete change in direction without any prior warning. Personally, I felt a bit cheated. In summary, not the right book for me, though I am sure that a lot of people will love it.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a free electronic copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Toni's husband died during a military assignment, so to make things easier to cope with, she moves to a town closer to her mother, with her daughter, Evie. She get a part time job and hopes that things will finally turn around for her and Evie. Things start to go awry as she starts to get dates and times wrong, a feeling of being watched. The more paranoid she gets, the more she keeps popping these sedatives that she has. It's just to calm her down so she can focus, right? It's ok that Evie sometimes can't wake her up. Soon everything will be all better... she just needs to get through each day. But then Evie ends up missing on a day she's late picking her up from school... and it's all her fault.. isn't it?

Bookouture is throwing out some amazing thrillers! This one is told mainly through Toni's eyes but bounces back and forth with short stints through Evie and other character's eyes as the book progresses. The author truly made me hate some of these characters. I swear I have a new frown line on my forehead after reading this book! I do love to hate on some characters though. And to take something as simple as a mother's negligence to create an atmosphere of doom... *shiver*... you will definitely feel the twists in this one - I had to do a double take at one point because something I thought turned out to NOT be - way to go Slater, way..to..go! I am most definitely going to continue reading her work and am adding her first thriller to my TBR now.

So last night I couldn’t sleep so decided to start this book. Two hours later I was downstairs making myself a coffee so I could stay awake to finish this brilliantly gripping and twisty tale of a mother trying to solve her daughter’s disappearance. I started off telling myself “just one more chapter” then I gave up and totally abandoned myself to the fact that this book was not getting put down till the very last word was read.

We have all been here I think, terrified of being late somewhere to pick up a child and something bad happening so that there is no one there when you arrive -it has certainly been a recurring nightmare of mine! And I have to say that A LOT of books play on this greatest fear as a parent, which is why there are so many missing child books out there. So to stand out from the crowd, there has to be something very unique and special about this sub-genre, the development of the plot especially. And here K.L. Slater really does pull the rabbit out of the hat with her take of a family in turmoil, but beware the “smoke and mirrors” as this book will totally mess with your mind!

I enjoyed Safe With Me, the authors previous psychological suspense, but this one resonated with me far more than I had expected it to and I loved it far more than I was expecting to. Her writing style draws you right from the very first page, creating an unputdownable mystery where you just have to know what happened to Evie and why. So be prepared to start this only if you have nothing else to do. You have been warned!

Many thanks to Bookouture for my review copy of Blink.

K.L. Slater had me gripped from the start of this, her second psychological thriller. The story flips back and forward from 3 years ago to the present day.

Toni has moved back closer to her Mum after the death of her husband, so she can help look after Toni's daughter, Evie, who is 5 years old.But then Evie disappears after leaving school and with no trace or CCTV evidence, the police struggle to find her.

Another tense read from the author. With a few twists along the way, make this edge of your seat read hard to put down. You will think you know who the guilty party is, then, the curve ball comes and sends you in a divferent direction. I do recommend this book. Loved it.

I would like to thank NetGalley, Bookouture, and the author K.L. Slater for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is tense edge of the seat thriller from K L Slater. A woman lies in a vegetative state (locked in syndrome) in a hospital room. All she can do is blink.

Three years earlier Toni Cotter and her daughter Evie moves to Nottingham to be with nearer her mother, after her husband dying in Afghanistan. Both are not coping Toni secretly taking her dead husbands sedatives to get through the day and Evie coping with the move away from her friends and starting a new school which she hates.

This is going to be another best seller. For me personally I enjoyed this immensely but, I thought the ending let it down for me, it just didn't add up.

Omg i have just finished this book and im blown away this is definatly my favourite book this year by far and it will take a special book to top this one i loved every bit of this book it had it all suspense emotions and twists and turns that made me feel id been on a emotional rollercoaster i loved it well done.

I enjoyed this book, a good little thriller. I especially liked that it was set in a location that I kind of know from my childhood and my family live in Bulwell.
This kept me guessing, a couple of points in I thought I'd solved it, but, I didn't solve it all.
Until I read this I didn't understand just how easily a child can be abducted from a supposedly safe environment. The main character Toni initially appeared to know what she needed to do but simply wasn't able, through, grief guilt along with a burgeoning drug habit from 'mummies little helpers'

4.5* LOVED. A little slow to begin with, but the wonderully developed and flawed characters kept me intrigued.
I loved the way the story unraveled the different point of views and the flashbacks between past and present. Def rec.
*Thanks NetGalley for a copy in exchange for an honest review*

I really enjoyed this book! I've always loved the thrillers that go back and forth from character perspectives as well as varying time lines. It's a style of writing I've always enjoyed because it slowly starts to fill in the gaps and answering the questions you have as you go. We bounce to and from present day (in a hospital) and to three years earlier. In the past timeline, we follow the perspectives of Toni, Harriet Watson, Evie, and Diary Entries from an unknown character.

The book begins at a hospital. She is in a vegetative state and the doctors believe that is no longer alive (even though she is desperately trying to communicate with them). All that we know is that there was an accident and that Evie is missing. Throughout the book we are brought through flashbacks from different perspectives to try and figure out what happened. Without giving away any spoilers, this book kept me guessing until the very end. I loved it! I read this book in two sittings. It's an addictive read and it kept me guessing until the final two chapters.

If you like thrillers with twists, turns, and constant guessing then I highly recommend this book to you.

Thank you to Bookouture for sending me an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.