Today I’m delighted to be taking part in the blog tour for The Closer I Get. It’s also one of my 20 Books Of Summer. The review is written with thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me on the tour and Orenda Books for my copy of the book.

Blurb:

A compulsive, disturbingly relevant, twisty and powerful psychological, social-media thriller from the bestselling author of The Black Path

’An intense, tightly calibrated thriller’ Huffington Post

Tom is a successful author, but he’s struggling to finish his novel. His main distraction is an online admirer, Evie, who simply won’t leave him alone.
Evie is smart, well read and unstable; she lives with her father and her social-media friendships are not only her escape, but everything she has.
When she’s hit with a restraining order, her world is turned upside down, and Tom is free to live his life again, to concentrate on writing.
But things aren’t really adding up. For Tom is distracted but also addicted to his online relationships, and when they take a darker, more menacing turn, he feels powerless to change things. Because maybe he needs Evie more than he’s letting on.
A compulsive, disturbingly relevant, twisty and powerful psychological thriller, The Closer I Get is also a searing commentary on the fragility and insincerity of online relationships, and the danger that can lurk just one ‘like’ away…

Review:

I’ve heard a lot about The Closer I Get and how creepy it is, and boy, did this live up to expectations! Burston plants a seed and lets it grow until it grew so much that I was looking over my shoulder  convinced that someone was following me! We are all so aware of social media and I found it frightening to have the damage it can do laid out in front of me in this way. The tension is palpable and I was never sure where the line between truth and fiction was; something which compelled me to read on to the end of this gripping story.

The narrative is told (mostly) from the alternate viewpoints of Tom and Evie. I didn’t find either of them particularly likeable but I was fascinated by their use of references to famous quotations or song lyrics, as this helped me to delve deeper into their personalities and their motives for behaving in the way they did. I may not have liked them, but I wanted to know where their lives took them.

The ending is immense and I was gripped to the edge of my seat as the tension rose and rose. I always like a novel with a twist and this one did not disappoint.

The Closer I Get is available from Amazon.

You can follow the rest of the blog tour here: