Margot Lewis is a school teacher who also has an ‘Agony Aunt’ column in the local newspaper under the name of Amy. She suddenly begins receiving letters from a Bethan Avery, who famously went missing nearly 20 years ago. Is this a cruel hoax or something more sinister? Is it related to the recent school girl, Katie, who has also gone missing?

I got this from NetGalley to read - and was quite cautious as I find many of these psychological thrillers to be rubbish. I probably stuck with this as much as I did due to the fact I could relate to the main character, Margot, quite a lot. She was going through a separation and divorce at a young age and found this aspect of her current day life interesting. However, the book itself was just as unbelievable as I find many of these books to be, and for the first part of the book it seemed to drudge on. The “twist” made me inwardly groan and from then on for me personally, it was simply a case of getting to the finish – the ending was also as expected.

This book has a compelling premise - an agony aunt receives a troubling letter from missing girl Bethan Avery - only the letters are written as if she is young and freshly kidnapped, and she went missing over twenty years ago.

Margot, who is the 'Dear Amy' agony aunt, is swiftly drawn into two missing person cases - Bethan's, and schoolgirl Katie's, who went missing just the other week. They may be connected. Can the letters help save Katie, if not Bethan?

It's well-written and quite haunting in places but I essentially found the main character a bit annoying. There's a slow reveal that is very guessable and while the Margot has reasons for not getting there as quickly as the reader, I'm just not sure I bought it. I didn't really buy the way the police/investigators/whoever brought her into the case, either.

It was an engaging read. I didn't much stop for breath until I got to the end. But the premise and first chapter or so were much stronger than the rest of the book. It just didn't quite live up to expectations for me.

This is a psychological thriller. Margot Lewis is the agony aunt for The Cambridge Examiner. Her advice column, Dear Amy, gets all kinds of letters. One letter is from a girl who was kidnapped twenty years before. Margot feels the responsibility to unravel the mystery.
The book is slow in places but it packs a lot in. I did not enjoy the ending and was at this time struggling to keep up. I had not worked out the plot so it needed all my concentration. The characters are well presented and believable.
As a debut novel I think it is promising and I would not hesitate to read more by this author..
I am pleased I read this book.

Figured this out long before the author revealed it,still enjoyed the book ,but found it all very obvious!!!

If psychological thrillers float your boat then you will love 'Dear Amy'. It is just dark enough to be disturbing, just twisted enough to be intriguing. The characters are believable and sympathetic and I liked the setting of academic Cambridge combined with the lonely East Anglian countryside. As usual when I read this genre, I didn't see the inevitable 'twist' coming and therefore I enjoyed it.

All in all, a welcome distraction and an entertaining, exciting read.

Margot aka Dear Amy begins to receive letters from Bethany Avery but where is Bethan and why now...well that's what I was waiting what seemed an awfully long time to find out! A frustratingly long winded book yet one with such a clever enjoyable plot at its heart that made me want to keep reading!

Margot is a very strong woman, who has some serious psychological issues. However I really liked the way she was dealing with them. Most of the novel is told by Margot, however I really loved that there were parts, where other characters had chance to express themselves. There was a part where the kidnapped schoolgirl had to tell her side of the story and how she was feeling in some situations and I was ecstatic when author gave an insight of the kidnapper’s brain and how he saw and felt during the whole story. The ability to involve more than one character in the book makes me enjoy it way more, and I am over the moon when authors do it. The characters in this publication were quite interesting and enjoyable.
I don’t think that the whole idea of getting letters from kidnapped people was very original, but the fact that they come after so long kept the suspense going. Unfortunately not for very long, because at least for me it was quite predictable what the outcome will be and who the sender was. The intensity of the plot I would describe as “V” shape. The beginning had turns and was interesting, the middle of the book got quite boring and predictable and then towards the end it became interesting and twisty again. I was not very excited to read so many Margot’s thoughts, as some of them were quite irrelevant and felt like dragging unnecessary. There was some action going on but it could’ve been a bit faster paced. It was quite easy to read this book; it has a simple and understandable writing style. The author shares her love for Cambridge in a very enjoyable way by describing the places and buildings very nicely and with great detail. Never been there but from this book I can imagine it is a beautiful place. I really liked that author touched such themes as school hierarchy, influence of internet posts and how naive young girls can be. I do hope that people who read the book will learn something from this book. I truly enjoyed the ending of the book and I think it was really thought trough and concluding. It didn’t leave any unfinished business and I’m very happy about it. So to conclude, It is a good book if you looking for mystery, some twists and turns and the story which was told from more than one point of view.

thank you for letting me review loved it will post my review amazon what a brilliant story

I hate not finishing a book but unfortunately with this one I only got half way through and couldn't continue.
When I pick up a physcological thriller I expect to feel suspense and mystery and felt these were both laxking here.
I felt there wasn't enough emphasis on the 'crime' and a lot more focus on Margot. Every time something was mentioned about the crime I had to flick back to the previous mention to remind myself what was happening. For example when Alex is included in the reconstruction, I had to go back quite a way to find where Alex was first mentioned.
I couldn't connect with Margot's character either. I couldn't imagine her age, or who she was as a person and then when you start reading about her background and mental illness I struggled even more to imagine this character.
Although the idea for a good read is here, it just didn't grip my attention and struggked to get back into it everytime I picked it up.

Dear Amy was a gripping read which had me in suspense throughout and unsure about what was going to happen. It had the expected twists and turns of a thriller and likeable characters. A good read, thank you for the loan!

A good first novel for the author. The main character, Amy, was pretty likeable but flawed. She had a bit of a chequered past, all of which she was trying to cover up. All the others characters were relateable to. The plot is young girls being abducted and the Amy, a local newspaper agony aunt, starts to receive letters from the first, presumed dead victim. Bit of a shock as it's written as if she's still the age she was when abducted. How can you receive letters from a dead victim and even if alive, why is she still the same age? Amy's currently starting divorce proceedings, drinks a little too much, is a school teacher full time (her column is a second job) but she seems very empathetic to the victims' thoughts and feelings, maybe because she works with teen school children (as well as she used to be one herself). However, the more her past was revealed, the less I started to care about her. I also found the booked time jumped in some places. One particular chapter kind of left a cliffhanger but the next started some time later rather than pick up from where the previous one left off. I'd have enjoyed a straight chronological follow through explaining what happened rather than another character explaining what happened as a conversation with Amy.
I read it fairly quickly though but may be because I had to stay awake overnight in hospital and this helped me do so. So, it wasn't so boring that I dropped off but it also wasn't a page turner for me in normal circumstances. I did want to finish it though. I wouldn't be opposed to reading more from this author.

I enjoyed the first 20% of this book tremendously. I loved the main character. I did not see the twist coming. However, it began to feel very long and I found most other characters somewhat uninteresting.

Thank you for the review copy.

An easy to read thriller, but I did guess correctly the ending

I loved this book, from beginning to end!
It was gripping, kept me on the edge of my seat, and I cared very much about the characters, especially the main one.
The twists of the story kept me reading, and I'm definitely going to be a follower of Helen Callahan from now on.

‘I was trying, desperately, to keep a hold on my world – my job, my vanished husband and my column – but I was disconnecting. The ties to my ordinary life were loosening, snapping, and the dark world of Bethan Avery was becoming more real than my own.’

Margot Lewis is an agony art for Dear Amy, a column in the local newspaper, and a Classics teacher at a school in Cambridge. Getting strange letters is par for the course, but nothing quite as disturbing has reached her postbox until she starts receiving cries for help supposedly penned by Bethan Avery, a local girl who vanished without a trace in the 1990s.

Half believing it’s a hoax, half horribly spooked, Margot involves the local police and is passed onto a cold-case investigator, who has been looking into the disappearances of young girls in the Cambridgeshire area over the past two decades. So the crux of the story is this; if the letters are to be believed, why is this girl, two decades after her kidnapping, writing to an agony aunt? Is she still being held captive? Is her abductor behind the other despicable crimes?

And, of course, these letters coincide with the disappearance of another young girl, Katie Browne – yet another victim who has vanished without a trace.

But as Margot becomes increasingly entangled in the case, her own demons start to come to the fore, and the fissures in her own memory and repressed history begin to deepen.

Casting the protagonist of your psychological thriller as an unstable divorcee (female, of course) with a history of mental illness/addiction is, I feel, wearing a bit thin. The unreliable narrator trope all often ends up feeling a bit too convenient a device for filling a multitude of plot holes and dropping a dramatic twist on the reader. The issue here was also that we spent too much time inside Margot’s head, and the outside world – i.e. the plot; the rest of the characters, suffered as a result. Being deeply immersed in the life of a character only works when that character is engaging and three-dimensional – and unfortunately, Margot and I didn’t really click.

However, there were redeeming parts of the novel that I enjoyed. Disclaimer: I never guess twists, but even with this caveat I’m confident that this is a cleverly executed bombshell. Despite a meandering start, once the pace picked up in the second half, the writing became increasingly taut and tense. The slow dawning realisation of truth – on the part of myself and the protagonist – was cleverly written, and it had me pause for a few minutes to piece it all together.

The narrative told from the point of view of the abductor, and the kidnapped child, was chilling in its evocation of pure psychopathy – but what I appreciated about this novel was that the violence was never overdone or gratuitous – Callaghan leaves the reader to fill in the blanks, to envision themselves the horrors. Sometimes what isn’t said is more powerful than what is.

Enjoyable a read though it ultimately was, Dear Amy isn’t one of those psychological thrillers I’ll be thinking about after finishing. However, if there was one thing that set it apart from others in this genre on the market, it was the writing style. Callaghan did an impressive job of creating a highly uncomfortable, sinister environment with her carefully crafted metaphors and tightly-wound prose;

‘The moon was round and fat, bloated with white light, as it sailed amongst the needlepoints of stars. I had the feeling I was falling, even though I was standing upright. The winter air coldly searched my wound, knifing into its unhealthy, unhealing heat.’

A worthwhile read, if you can overlook the flaws.

***

Totally disappointed with this book and so glad that I did not purchase it but thank you Net Galley for letting me read it and not waste my money. I cannot say anything positive about this book.

When I first heard about this book I really wanted to get my hands on it. I loved the concept. I've always found something a bit weird about agony aunt columns so when Margot starts receiving letters from a missing girl from 20 years ago I absolutely loved it. However, as the book progressed I started to lose interest. I found the 'twist' incredibly implausible and it made me question whether what I'd read at the beginning was completely unreliable.
I really liked Margot's character and the writing style had a really exciting pace, however the book just did not keep my interest.

A really interesting read, I was on the edge of my seat all the way through! Margot was a really relatable to character. I however feel that the last 20 pages lost a bit of their way and the ending a little rushed. Nether theless I am looking forward to the next novel by this author

Very good book but sad also. How the mind plays tricks preventing us from seeing the truth. A great crime story with a great twist,

Though this thriller was a fun read, it didn't hold my interest the whole way through. I found the best part of the book was what the description I first read on NetGalley. The twist I found to be pretty obvious and had it figured out pretty quickly and I lost interest soon after. It didn't help that I found it difficult to connect with any of the characters. Still, it was easy to read and I found it hard to put down. Also, Cambridge is one of my favourite cities and I enjoyed the familiarity of this book as it's set there.