View source for All Her Fault by Andrea Mara

{{infobox1
|title=All Her Fault
|author=Andrea Mara
|reviewer=Sue Magee
|genre=Thrillers
|summary=A twisty story which holds you from the very first page - and the ending is so appropriate and I would never have guessed it. Highly recommended.
|rating=4.5
|buy=Yes
|borrow=Yes
|pages=400
|publisher=Bantam Press
|date=July 2021
|isbn=978-1787634497
|website=http://www.marjacq.com/andrea-mara.html
|cover=1787634493
|aznuk=1787634493
|aznus=1787634493
}}
It had seemed like one of those serendipitous events which sometimes happen.  Marissa Irvine had been hoping that the opportunity would arise for her son, Milo, to go on a play date.  She was concerned that he didn't have any friends at his new school.  Milo would go home from Kerryglen National School in an affluent Dublin suburb with his classmate Jacob - and Marissa would pick him up from 14 Tudor Grove a little later.  What could be better?  Only, when Marissa arrived at the house, expecting to meet Jacob's mother, Jenny, the door was answered by Esther, who didn't know Jenny or Jacob.  The phone number she'd been given for Jenny was not recognised.  Milo had disappeared.  And so had Jenny's nanny.

When something like this happens there are two stampedes.  The first is to be part of the search for the missing child but the second - and far longer-lasting - is the rush to find someone to blame.  It doesn't need to be the person who took the child  - that can happen later.  Right now blame can be loaded onto the mother 'who put her work before her child', Jacob's mother, who employed the person thought to have taken Milo and - of course, Milo's nanny.  There's plenty of choice there, isn't there?  First among the blamers is Adeline Furlong-Kennedy, Jenny's mother-in-law, who's never short of a barbed comment which might wound her daughter-in-law - and Jenny's husband is doing little to protect her.

As a reviewer, you sometimes wonder if you're being fair to a book when you review it under difficult circumstances.  I can now confirm that 'moving house' comes firmly under the heading of difficult circumstances and I very nearly put the book down with the intention of picking it up later - but then I realised that it was actually taking my mind off what was going wrong elsewhere.  I felt for Marissa - but it was Jenny who really grabbed my attention.  She might have employed the nanny but she had to guts to go to Marissa and see how she could help - and then to continue to help.

I thought I knew how the story was going to go.  I had it mapped out in my mind, only to find that I was completely wrong as the plot headed off down some completely unexpected pathways and I completely revised my opinion of various characters.  The ending is stunning - and oh, so gloriously appropriate!

I'd like to thank the publishers for making a review copy available to the Bookbag.

It goes back a while but for more thrillers and crime from Dublin, have a look at [[Dark Times In The City by Gene Kerrigan]] or [[Can Anybody Help Me? by Sinead Crowley]].

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