Read of the Week

You Are Not Alone

Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen

Pan Macmillan

Review: Lindiwe Mlandu

Shay Miller leads a very quiet life in New York. Aged 31, she’s lost contact with many of her friends. Without a permanent job, she’s forced to share a flat with a guy she’s secretly in love with.

Shay, who has a low self-esteem, is obsessed with data. She collects data on everything. She carries her data book everywhere. One Sunday morning, she witnesses a suicide on the subway. Shay becomes obsessed with the woman who jumped in front of a train. She embarks on a mission to find out everything she can about the woman, who had vacant eyes, just before leaping to her death.

Her search leads her into the arms of Cassandra and Jane Moore. Shay thinks she’s finally found a sisterhood to belong to. The sisters have glamorous lives, but they embrace the lonely outsider. Shay does everything possible to fit in with her new friends.

What she doesn’t know is that the dead woman, Amanda, belonged to a vigilante group. The Moore sisters, who are the leaders of the vigilante group, decide to frame their naive new friend for murder.

Shay has to use her data-collecting skills to clear her name as the Moore sisters and their accomplices are working overtime to make sure that she goes down for murder after one of their vigilante assignments went wrong and a rapist lost his life.

This story about a group of women, who are trying to avenge wrongdoing, is intriguing.

In their quest for an eye for an eye, they cross the line and there’s no going back. The book is brilliantly written with a surprising twist.