Title: Follow Me
Author: Kathleen Barber
Published: February 2020, Gallery Books
Format: ARC E-copy, 352 pages
Source: Netgalley via Publisher
Summary:
From the author of Are You Sleeping—soon
to be an Apple TV series—comes a cautionary tale of oversharing in the
social media age for fans of Jessica Knoll and Caroline Kepnes’s You.
Everyone wants new followers…until they follow you home.
Audrey
Miller has an enviable new job at the Smithsonian, a body by reformer
Pilates, an apartment door with a broken lock, and hundreds of thousands
of Instagram followers to bear witness to it all. Having just moved to
Washington, DC, Audrey busies herself impressing her new boss,
interacting with her online fan base, and staving off a creepy upstairs
neighbor with the help of the only two people she knows in town: an
ex-boyfriend she can’t stay away from and a sorority sister with a
high-powered job and a mysterious past.
But Audrey’s faulty door
may be the least of her security concerns. Unbeknownst to her, her move
has brought her within striking distance of someone who’s obsessively
followed her social media presence for years—from her first WordPress
blog to her most recent Instagram Story. No longer content to simply
follow her carefully curated life from a distance, he consults the dark
web for advice on how to make Audrey his and his alone. In his quest to
win her heart, nothing is off-limits—and nothing is private.
Kathleen Barber’s electrifying new thriller will have you scrambling to cover your webcam and digital footprints.
My thoughts: Stalker books are becoming one of my favorite kind of reads – not sure what that says about me but hey…I love me a good stalker story! And I will forever love Carolyn Kepnes Joe from You, but what Kathleen Barber does here in Follow Me opens a whole new crazy in regards to social media that has me a little freaked out if I’m being honest.
First of all, I love that this book opens with the author’s note. I’m the type of reader that always reads the author’s note, wherever it is. If it’s at the back of the book, though, I will usually wait to read it after I read the book, BUT, I thought it was so clever of Kathleen Barber to put it in the front of the book so that she could let the reader know where she came up with the idea for this book. For me, that alone set the tone for this book, already giving me chills. Now this book isn’t outright scary like a horror book, but it will give you pause when you think about all the crazies out there that can manipulate what you put out there and can potentially be watching you right now.
Told from three different points of view, we follow Audrey, Cat and “Him” and while I didn’t necessary love all three characters, I appreciated being inside all three heads, especially “Him.” I always love being inside a villain’s head and it was absolutely chilling in this case. The justifications for what he was doing, for how far he had gone were just unreal and the whole time I was trying to figure out who “He” was – I was suspicious of every guy Audrey came into contact with, not putting it all together until right before the reveal.
This book will certainly have you rethinking what you put up on your social media channels. Do you put too much out there? Do you know if any of your followers are watching you a little too closely? It’s hard to know but I do know that I will for sure be covering all the cameras on my computers and watching what I share.
I loved this book. It was thrilling with a menacing undertone that completely captivated me. Kathleen Barber is definitely going on my must-read list and I cannot wait to see what she writes next!
