What happens when someone whose job is judging other people’s stories discovers that someone else has started writing hers?
That question became the starting point for my new novel, An Honest Review.
It’s a psychological thriller about Olivia Brooks, a hugely successful online book reviewer with an audience of two million people. Publishers want her attention. Readers trust her judgement. Authors know that a few sentences from Olivia can change how thousands of people see their work.
Then an unknown writer called Clara Bennett contacts her.
Clara doesn’t want praise.
She just wants Olivia to read her book.
And she isn’t particularly interested in taking no for an answer.
The power of the reviewer
I’ve spent a lot of my life around books.
One thing that has always interested me is the strange relationship between writers, reviewers and readers.
An author can spend several years writing a novel. They can obsess over every chapter, character and sentence. By the time the book reaches the world, it might represent thousands of hours of work.
A reviewer can dismiss it in a paragraph.
That isn’t necessarily wrong.
Nobody owes an author a good review. Nobody even owes them a review at all.
Readers should be able to say that they hated a book. Reviewers should be able to criticise writing they think is bad. An honest review is far more useful than meaningless praise.
But there is still an imbalance of power there.
And I thought that imbalance could make the foundation of a psychological thriller.
Meet Olivia Brooks
Olivia genuinely believes in what she does.
She doesn’t see herself as cruel.
She sees herself as honest.
The publishing world is full of politeness, hype and people saying nice things about books they secretly thought were mediocre. Olivia believes somebody needs to cut through all that.
Her readers follow her precisely because she is willing to say what other people won’t.
Over time, though, that honesty has become part of her performance.
Olivia has two million followers.
Her reviews can affect careers.
Her sharpest comments spread online.
She has gradually become very good at turning judgement into entertainment.
And she has stopped thinking very much about the people on the receiving end.
That made her fascinating to write.
I didn’t want the protagonist of An Honest Review to be an entirely innocent person being targeted by an entirely irrational stranger.
Olivia has flaws.
Sometimes enormous ones.
She can be arrogant, dismissive and unnecessarily cruel.
But none of that means she deserves what happens next.
What if the writer refused to disappear?
Clara Bennett is one of the countless writers Olivia ignores.
She has spent years writing a novel and believes it deserves to be read.
Olivia disagrees.
Or, more accurately, Olivia doesn’t care enough to have an opinion.
For Clara, that indifference is almost worse than criticism.
So she sends Olivia an email.
Then another.
Then she appears in Olivia’s livestream.
And eventually a manuscript arrives at Olivia’s home.
The title is An Honest Review.
The protagonist is called Olivia.
The book describes her home. Her routines. Her thoughts. Things a stranger should not know.
That was the point where the idea really clicked for me.
The reviewer has spent years turning other people’s work into material.
Now someone has turned her into material.
The manuscript knows what happens next
I love psychological thrillers built around control.
Who has it? Who thinks they have it? And what happens when that certainty begins to crack?
Olivia starts the novel believing she controls almost everything that matters.
She decides which emails deserve answering.
She decides which books deserve attention.
She decides what her audience sees.
She even carefully controls the apparently spontaneous version of herself she presents on camera.
Then Clara hands her a story in which all those decisions have already been made.
Olivia is no longer the critic standing outside the book.
She is inside it.
And Clara hasn’t written the ending yet.
Why make it a bookish psychological thriller?
I could have written this story about almost any kind of influencer.
But making Olivia a book reviewer allowed me to push the idea further.
Both women understand stories.
Both understand framing.
Both understand that the way you present an event can completely change how people interpret it.
Olivia has spent years reducing books to arguments she can communicate to an audience.
Clara is doing something similar with Olivia’s life.
That created a psychological battle where words matter almost as much as physical actions.
Even when Olivia is frightened, part of her is analysing what is happening.
She notices the setting. She notices dramatic irony. She notices when events feel too convenient.
At one point, while driving through increasingly horrible weather towards an isolated cottage in the Cumbrian fells, she effectively starts reviewing the scene she is living through.
Too much weather.
Far too obvious.
A competent author would probably tone it down.
Unfortunately, the weather doesn’t care.
The strange intimacy of online audiences
Another idea behind An Honest Review is something that has become normal incredibly quickly.
We can know enormous amounts about people who have absolutely no idea who we are.
Watch someone online for several years and you might know where they live, what they read, what annoys them, what makes them laugh, what coffee they drink and what they said during a livestream at two o’clock in the morning five years ago.
To the person watching, that can feel like familiarity.
To the person being watched, you are still a stranger.
Clara believes she understands Olivia.
In some ways, she actually does.
That might be more disturbing than if she were completely wrong.
What happens after the thriller is supposed to end?
There was another part of the idea I became particularly interested in while writing.
Most thrillers have an obvious endpoint.
Escape. Rescue. The police arrive. The antagonist is arrested. Credits roll.
But I kept wondering what happens afterwards.
Because Olivia’s entire life exists online.
If something terrible happened to somebody with an enormous public platform, the story wouldn’t end when they reached safety.
It would become content.
There would be interviews. Podcasts. Documentaries. News reports. Comment sections. People would choose sides.
And, because this is a story about books, somebody would inevitably publish one.
So An Honest Review becomes something slightly different as it progresses.
The question stops being simply whether Olivia can escape Clara.
It becomes: Who gets to tell what happened?
And if two people experience the same event completely differently, who owns the truth?
A slightly different psychological thriller
An Honest Review is still very much a psychological thriller.
There is stalking, obsession, isolation, imprisonment, manipulation and a battle between two women who understand one another far too well.
But it probably sits towards the more literary end of the thrillers I’ve written.
It became a novel about criticism. About creativity. About parasocial relationships. About how easily experience becomes entertainment.
And, above all, about who gets to control a story.
I suspect Olivia would have several complaints about the finished novel.
Clara would probably insist that those complaints proved the point.
Neither of them would be particularly easy to have dinner with.
Read An Honest Review
Olivia Brooks has built a career deciding which stories deserve to be heard.
Then struggling writer Clara Bennett sends her a manuscript about Olivia herself.
When Olivia agrees to meet her, she wakes bound to a chair in an isolated cottage with the unfinished manuscript waiting.
Clara doesn’t just want an honest review.
She wants Olivia to help write the ending.
An Honest Review is available now on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.
