Another great thriller from Abigail Dean - pacey, twisty and dark with complex characters and brilliant scene setting. I think perhaps this just wasn't to my personal taste as I did struggle to get into it but it was definitely still a great thriller with emotive, interesting narration.

Powerful, emotive, disturbing, nuanced and thought provoking.

This was an excellent piece of work, slow paced yet shuddering with tension, the telling of the story from multiple perspectives and the timeline was so very well done.

I haven’t read anything quite like this before.

All the stars 🌟 #Jorecommends

Thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins UK Audio for permission to listen to this advanced copy in return for an honest review.

**Listened to the audio book and read the electronic copy**

This book is EVERYWHERE!! Sooo much hype! I was super excited to get my teeth into this.
The book started well, and immediately I was 'in'!
However, the more the book went on, the more it lost me. It was just too long, and didn't keep the same momentum that it started with. I was waiting to find out what happened, but so much of this book was filler, and then it made me forget what I was waiting for.
I feel like Abigail Dean tried to do too much with it, and therefore it didn't really do anything. It would have benefited from 100-200 pages less I feel.

The audio narrators were great, and did an excellent job at changing up the accents to help with the huge amount of characters. I definitely preferred listening to the audio book than the written text.

Overall is was just OK - I just wanted more - it promised so much, and started with so much - but just didn't deliver!

Thank you to NetGalley for my audio book Day One by Abigail Dean. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to both narrators and they did a great job conveying the emotions that follow a school massacre in the little picturesque village of Stonesmere.

Day One is a concert that is put on for the youngest learners to ease them into their first school year. The older children perform and this is when a single gunman entered the school hall and shot a beloved teacher and school children.

We get the point of view from various characters including Martha (Marty), the teacher’s daughter, who was supposed to be in the school hall – why was she captured on the CCTV arriving minutes after the shooting?

Trent, a former pupil of the school and Ray, a conspiracy theorist, try and convince people online that the shooting never actually happened. ‘The Truthists’ as they like to call themselves. The story jumps around from the events at Day One and then fast forward to Year 8 and back again to two months after Day One. You get snippets and try and figure out what is the truth and who is telling the truth. By the end of the book, you really know the backstory of all the characters and what you initially thought is true, is not the same at the end of the book.

I really wanted to enjoy this, the description sounded intriguing and I was expecting a fast paced tale of a school shooter but unfortunately not really much happened. I found myself speeding up the narration to get to the end, waiting for a bit twist or reveal that it had been building up to but it was a little underwhelming.