Ratings: 4/5⭐
Genre: Fiction, Psychological thriller
Number of Pages: 293
Format: Kindle
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published on: 22nd march 2018

“The ‘problem’ with having a conscience is you expect other people to have one too, so you analyse and evaluate their behaviour according to your own standards. But true sociopaths have no understanding why we all worry about rules or laws . . . or the lives and feelings of others.”

The Friend- Teresa Driscoll

The Friend- Teresa Driscoll

The Friend by Teresa Driscoll is a “psychological thriller with an emotional twist”, published in 2018. It deals with apprehensive and manipulative characters which make the story a gripping one!

Summary

The story begins with the narration of the protagonist- Sophie, who’s on a train, two hundred miles away from her son, who gets a piece of appalling information over a phone call. Her son and a boy of the same age met with an accident and are admitted to a hospital in Tetbury.

The story continues in flashbacks and in the present-day scenarios (mostly from Sophie’s point of view). Sophie lives in Tetbury, along with her son, Ben, and her husband, Mark. She remembers how she met Emma Carter, her “friend” who had a son, a year younger than Ben, named Theodore. They had just moved to Tetbury and soon Sophie and Emma become close friends, so good friends that they actually think of doing business together! But are they really friends? Do they actually have nothing to hide? What happens when they actually discover the dark secrets between them?

All these questions keep us hooked till the end.

Personal Reviews on The Friend

“She thought she could trust ‘The Friend'” was enough for me to pick this book up. I eventually got so hooked to ‘The Friend” that I used to read it in my class (usually during the boring lectures :p).

I liked the epilogue and the way the story advances. I’d say the plot is well thought of. It is the suspense that makes it an absolute page-turner. Since it’s a psychological thriller, the author has focused on every tiny detail. The pace is really slow but it also makes you want to read faster to catch up with what the end is like.

The emotional twist and the climax almost took my breath away because I didn’t really see it coming and it engulfed me all of a sudden with these mixed bag emotions.

However, I feel the narration is heightened unnecessarily in some places. The characters are strong and manipulative, and the climax keeps you hooked till you reach the last page.