Book Review: "Follow You Home" by Mark Edwards

If you've been reading my reviews then you probably know that when I read books by Mark Edwards, I am particularly struck by his ability to use things that seem supernatural and paranormal to show us how vulnerable people can get in times of great tension. In a recent book I read by him called In Her Shadow, this is especially true. But this book, entitled Follow You Home, we have a woman who already has a belief in the supernatural and thus, takes the idea of ghosts and runs with it. The protagonist though, isn't so sure. It risks everything, including what seemed to be a solid relationship that breaks down the moment they get home from a European trip which ended abruptly in Romania with a doomed train journey and a missing woman.

I think the first thing I have to do though before we go through the storyline is to lay out how convoluted and slightly less enthralling this was in comparison to his other books. It's not got that edge and tension that is regularly felt when we meet with his fiction and yet, it starts off as a brilliant slow-burn. I think the reason I felt this way is because of everything surrounding people going missing and/or dying. Very few people know that many people who have gone missing and/or died in mysterious circumstances and yet, every time the police get involved they seem to act as though they were born yesterday. Apart from this though, if I've said it once I've said it a million times: too many characters and too many convoluted pieces of information can ruin a really good story and that is almost what happened here.

When Laura and Daniel go travelling through Europe, they think they are going to have the time of their lives. However, on a train in Romania they meet some shady people and, yet they also meet a lovely couple whom they bond with. Unfortunately, Laura and Daniel find that their tickets and passports have been stolen and thus are told they cannot board the train. They are told to get off at the next stop. What they witness there they will not be able to forget, nor will they be able to tell anyone about when they get back. The story established is so tense and brilliant that the reason why this happens (which you find out later in the book) can feel like you were cheated out of a better storyline. It's not really packed full of secrets and lies, it's more like two people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The secrets and lies are a little shoe-horned in.

Then, once back in England, a whole host of strange things keep happening. Daniel's bank accounts are broken into, his laptop is stolen and Laura is targeted in an attack. The two broke up upon their return but now that their friends have been roped into it, it becomes harder to ignore. Now this is where I have an issue. If I could see what was happening here, how could the police not see it? The London police especially would have seen this go on before I'm guessing and yet, they never seem to notice anything apart from these two people who are connected to a string of deaths and disappearances for no apparent reason? It sounds unbelievable. The ending itself is even more unbelievable because there's an untraceable iPhone involved and we know that's not strictly speaking possible. Out of all of his books, this book has a lot of promise but failed to deliver when it came to the second half. Up until the halfway point, I was sure it was going to be a great story though.

All in all, I wanted to like this story because the first half felt very modern gothic and yet, the second half felt like watching a terrible Harlan Coben series on Netflix. It didn't fit together, didn't make much sense and the characters that kept being introduced didn't really have anything special about them. It all fell a bit flat. It's a shame because Mark Edwards can do so much better than this.

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