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    Dear Amy: A Novel
    Dear Amy: A Novel
    Dear Amy: A Novel
    Audiobook10 hours

    Dear Amy: A Novel

    Written by Helen Callaghan

    Narrated by Michelle Ford

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    In Helen Callaghan’s chilling, tightly-spun debut novel of psychological suspense, a teenage girl’s abduction stirs dark memories of a twenty-year-old cold case...

    Margot Lewis is a teacher at an exclusive high school in the English university town of Cambridge. In her spare time, she writes an advice column, “Dear Amy”, for the local newspaper.

    When one of Margot’s students, fifteen-year-old Katie, disappears, the school and the town fear the worst. And then Margot gets a “Dear Amy” letter unlike any of the ones she’s received before. It’s a desperate plea for rescue from a girl who says she is being held captive and in terrible danger—a girl called Bethan Avery, who was abducted from the local area twenty years ago…and never found.

    The letter matches a sample of Bethan’s handwriting that the police have kept on file since she vanished, and this shocking development in an infamous cold case catches the attention of criminologist Martin Forrester, who has been trying to find out what happened to her all those years ago. Spurred on by her concern for both Katie and the mysterious Bethan, Margot sets out—with Martin’s help—to discover if the two cases are connected.

    But then Margot herself becomes a target.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateOct 18, 2016
    ISBN9780062571816
    Author

    Helen Callaghan

    Helen Callaghan was born in California to British parents, and her early years were spent in both the United States and United Kingdom. She was a fiction specialist and buyer for Athena Bookshop, Dillons, and Waterstones for eight years. She read archaeology at Cambridge University, a subject she is still passionate about, and works in IT.

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    Reviews for Dear Amy

    3.5/5

    96 ratings14 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A fantastic read! Dear Amy is perfect for crime thriller junkies, but also for those intrigued with fictional tales that explores the human psyche. I was utterly enthralled from beginning to end. Definitely worth a read.
    • 4/5
      Margot Lewis is an agony aunt and she starts to receive letters from Bethany Avey who has been missing for two decades. Katie Browne a school girl has gone missing and Margot suspects the letters will lead to Katie.I really enjoy psychology thrillers at the moment. Some I find very good others quite average. This thriller started out really well and I was quite hooked.The book wasn't quite what I expected. Due to the title Dear Amy I was expecting a story based on letters or diary entries, or even told through them. However it didn't distract me from enjoying the book. I did work out quite early on what was probably going on and when revealed I was proven correct. I did think that the story was a little predictable and times I did think how really plausible the story was concerning Margot. At times I was getting confused what had actually happened to Margot but all does come clear.However I enjoyed reading the book, not the best out there but enough for me to stick with it and to find out how it all ends. A little more than average thriller whuch I would recommend to anybody who enjoys this type of read.Thank you to the publisher via Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review the book.
    • 4/5
      Margot Lewis ist Lehrerin in Cambridge, die mit der Trennung von ihrem Noch-Gatten Eddy beschäftigt ist. In ihrer Freizeit betreut sie eine Kolumne namens "Dear Amy" für die regionale Zeitung. In dieser Kolumne beantwortet Margot die Briefe, die ihr von den Lesern der Zeitung zugeschickt werden. Eines Tages findet sie inmitten der Briefe einen Hilferuf von Bethan Avery, die in ihrem Schreiben um Hilfe fleht. Bethan verschwand vor 20 Jahren und gilt seitdem als vermisst. Noch beunruhigender ist die Tatsache, dass ein Mädchen aus Margots Schulklasse ebenfalls seit Kurzem abgängig ist. Margot glaubt an ein Verbrechen und beschließt, bei der Polizei um Hilfe zu bitten. Kann es sein, dass ein Entführer Cambridge unsichermacht? Mit dem, was dann zutage tritt, hätte Margot dann aber auf keinen Fall gerechnet ... Das Debüt von Helen Callghan schlägt in die Kerbe von Autorinnen wie Gillian Flynn oder Paula Hawkins und wird die Leser von selbigen Autorinnen erfreuen. Ein solides Debüt mit einem nicht allzu originellen Plot, das sicher seine Leser finden wird.Breit einstellbares Lesefutter!
    • 2/5
      Margot Lewis is a harried teacher who also works as an advice columnist (Dear Amy) for the local paper. She's going through a divorce and rattled by the fact that one of her students, Katie, has gone missing. The police think Katie ran off, but Margot isn't so sure. When Margot receives a letter for her column purporting to be from Bethan Avery, a young girl who disappeared years ago, Margot thinks it must be a joke. But she also thinks of Katie and takes the letter to the police. When more letters show up, Margot is immersed upon a journey that will change her life forever--and endanger it in ways she could have never foreseen.

      I have mixed feelings about this novel. It was in no way terrible, but the character of Margot was a tough one to relate to and empathize with. Unlike some other reviewers, I didn't immediately see the novel's twist coming, but I found much of the plot implausible and hard to stomach. While the twist wasn't clear, the connection to Katie seemed to be, and parts were easy to work out. Further, it seems as if Margot is ridiculed and undermined for having a history of mental illness, without given any support or understanding. The novel really does a bit of disservice to those with mental problems. Some of the characters are more enjoyable than others and I really enjoyed parts of the novel, so I hesitated on such a low rating. However, other pieces are just so crazy and out-of-this-world that it was tough to really buy in. Margot grew on me a bit, but the plot didn't, and I found it hard to reconcile how all of this would come together just so by the end.

      In the end, bits and pieces of this thriller are interesting and well-done. The idea and structure are there, but it's not quite pulled off completely. I truly did enjoy some of it, and I don't really regret reading it, but I was left wanting a little more, or wishing it was better executed. It may speak to other thriller fans, it just didn't to me. Overall 2.5 stars.

      I received a copy of this novel from the publisher and Edelweiss (thank you!).

    • 4/5
      This is a gripping psychological thriller with quite a few twists and turns. Margot Lewis is a teacher and also an agony aunt for a local paper in Cambridge. When a young girl goes missing, Margot starts to receive letters, cries for help, from another young girl who went missing 20 years ago. Margot soon finds herself on a cat and mouse trail.This story had me on the edge of my seat at times, although I did think it a little far fetched. The narrator was quite 'chatty' but I liked her. I thought the plot was an interesting concept and there was rather a large twist which I did work out. However, it didn't ruin the story for me as I wanted to read on to find out if my surmising was correct. It's a roller coaster of a read and I found it very difficult to put down.An engrossing, exciting and intriguing mystery which held my attention to the last page. Recommended.
    • 2/5
      Oh Grit Lit, I wish I could quit you. Well, maybe that’s a bit harsh. When it’s good, it’s really quite entertaining, a genre that keeps me interested and on my toes. When it’s bad, well…… It's not pretty. Given the pendulous possible outcomes, I definitely go in treading lightly, and try to keep my expectations low enough that I’m not terribly disappointed, but high enough that I don’t just give up on it. Sometimes this works. Other times it kind of just a was from the get go and I can see it from a mile away. And this is what happened with “Dear Amy” by Helen Callaghan. I found myself charging through it not so much because I wanted to know what was going to happen, but because I just wanted to get it over with. Which is never really a resounding cheer for a book. Now it wasn’t “Gone Girl” levels of hot boiling rage on my part, but I did have just a few too many qualms with it as a whole that left me less than enthused about it. So let’s just kind of unpack it, shall we? I think there are going to be spoilers here, guys. I need to talk about them to really show you why I’m irritated.So first of all, Margot just punches every single Bingo square for stereotypical Grit Lit Heroine. She has been betrayed by her rat bastard husband (Eddy left her for another woman). She is outwardly pretty together as a teacher and advice columnist, but is afraid that if her dark past were to come out (heroin addiction being the worst part of it in her mind) everything would be ruined. And she is, of course, mentally unstable, with moments of questioning her sanity and the things that she is seeing in front of her. Old hat stuff, to be sure. But that’s not all. Oh no. Because in trope-y fashion, there of course has to be a huge twist, and this one was a doozy. Okay, here come the spoilers, folks. Get ready. Skip ahead if you really don’t want to be spoiled.Margot is Bethan. Bethan is Margot. Margot has been in a dissociative fugue state all this time in regards to her trauma, and has been writing the letters to herself, as the Katie kidnapping set her off.... Because of course it did. Okay, look, I like a good twist as much as the next person, but this one was a bit too ludicrous for me to swallow. I’m all for unreliable narrators, but when you have to work really hard to make them unreliable, going to ludicrous lengths to do it, that’s when I start to have a hard time with it. I think I actually said ‘what?’ when it was revealed, and then it felt like just a way to say ‘what is real and what is a lie?!’. Come off it. And given that this is the second thriller novel I’ve read in the past couple of months that has ‘dissociative fugue!’ as one of the ‘what a twist’ moments, it’s already starting to feel played out as well as totally random and unnecessary. That said, there is one more twist that I did like, involving Margot and a friend of hers named Angelique from when she was in a halfway house as a teenager. This was a plot point that I did enjoy, and while I saw it coming as well, it was still more believable than the huge Bethan Avery twist. Hell, had this twist I did like been the only curveball, I probably would have liked it more.Overall I was more interested in the Katie parts of the book, but even they felt a bit out of place because while Margot’s were in the first person, we’d jump to Katie’s chapters in the third person just so we could see what was going on with her. I think that it may have worked better if she had been in the first person as well, just because the way that it jumped into a different perspective made it feel almost like a cheat instead of a literary device to tell both stories in a consistent and interesting way. If this book had been from Katie’s POV I probably would have liked it more, even if it would have had the potential to get a BIT exploitative.So while I liked parts of this book, “Dear Amy” ultimately didn’t really do much for me. I think that Helen Callaghan definitely has writing skills, and I think that I could see myself giving her another shot, this one was a little too far on the Billy Eichner side of the pendulum.
    • 4/5
      Dear Amy is the debut novel from Amy Callaghan.Margot teaches English at a private school in England. She also writes an advice column for the local newspaper. She feels like a bit of a fraud though, handing out advice as her own personal life is a bit of a mess.Then Katie, one of her students disappears. And shortly after a 'help me' note arrives for 'Dear Amy' at the newspaper office from girl named Bethan - who also disappeared - twenty years ago. Is someone playing a horrible joke? Or could the author of the letter really be Bethan? Could she still be alive? Then another letter arrives and Margot finds herself involved in the investigation. Great premise!Dear Amy is told in first person from Margot's point of view. But as the book progresses, I began to have my doubts about Margot's outlook. Yes, Callaghan employed one of my favourite plot devices - the unreliable narrator. Margot is mercurial - hard to pin down and somewhat difficult to like. But that's okay with me - I don't necessarily need to like every character in a novel to enjoy the book. The perpetrator of the crimes is also given a voice - and their thoughts are distinctly chilling.As the pages turned, I began to think I had things figured out. Turns out I did, but kept turning as I wanted to see how the story played out. The pacing did seem to slow down in the latter third of the book and I think the resolution could have been reached a bit quicker. And I'm not sure if the romantic subplot was even necessary (or for this reader, believable).Overall, I enjoyed Dear Amy. It was entertaining and I liked Callaghan's writing. A good debut novel and I look forward to the next book from Helen Callaghan.
    • 4/5
      I found this in the book crossing phonebox, I was amused by it because it was called 'Dear Amy' and had a character called Brian on the first page, and was set in CambridgeIt turned out to be a page turning psychological thriller, about the race to find a kidnapped girl. It was hard to put down, the twists were well paced and signposted without being too contrived, the subplots about her soon-to-be-ex husband and the love interest detective were interesting. It was notable to have a heroine who couldn't have children, and that not be the point of the book at all, just an incidental point. The kidnapper scenes didn't feel sexy at all, just grimy and horrid with no glamour. And the ending of heroine is Angry and saves the day by violently beating up the bad guy is unexpected and gloriously cathartic. It's also notable for having a sympathetic heroine with mental health issues.Enjoyed this a lot, must go and see if she's written other things.
    • 3/5
      A solid thriller that a seasoned reader will see coming but still won't be able to put down. Margot wasn't exactly likable, and more than once I wanted to knock some sense into her, but I couldn't stop reading.Surprising and much appreciated was the subtext on mental illness. How someone, once diagnosis or open about prior hospitalization with others, becomes that diagnose and will only be seen by others as "sick" or "crazy" thereby tainting their protestations.3 stars (and I'll read Callaghan's next book)
    • 4/5
      Despite not appreciating the current trend for crime novels featuring kidnapping and incarcerating women, this was a gripping story. Margot teaches at a school in Cambridge where a young woman has gone missing. She also writes an agony column for the local paper. Letters start to arrive claiming to be from a kidnapped woman - from twenty years before.
    • 4/5
      A story of missing schoolgirls and then a teacher/local paper agony aunt starts receiving letters from one of those girls - why now and why is she receiving them? Margot is a bit of a cold fish but feisty with it, who won't give up as she begins to believe that Bethan is still alive. Engrossing from the start and unusual too with delightful descriptions of Cambridge. All in all a great debut and I look forward to the next book by this author!
    • 4/5
      This book was not what I expected. I won’t say more than that, but it just surprised me, the detour it took. The mystery was still wonderful, the characters even more so developed and interesting, so I was even happier to find the plot going places I didn’t expect. I will say this is about kidnapping and the mystery of what has happened to these young teens after their abductions and how the authorities go about solving the mystery now that letters have shown up delivered to the local advice columnist, Margot Lewis, AKA Dear Amy. Soon Lewis is deeply involved in searching for the last kidnapped girl, trying to unwrap the mystery surrounding the abductions. I see a lot of love it or hate it reviews, but this book kept my attention and kept me turning page after page, waiting for big finale to play out.
    • 5/5
      Dear Amy is a thrilling unputdownable to the end story.Helen Callaghan is an author to watch.I was given a digital copy of this book by the publisher Penguin / Michael Joseph via Netgalley in return for an honest unbiased review.
    • 3/5
      I loved the premise of this book.Missing schoolgirl Bethan Avery suddenly seems to be writing letters to an agony aunt asking to be rescued, but Bethan went missing nearly twenty years ago and is presumed dead, so this must be a hoax, surely? The police dismiss the letters as a cruel joke, but when they reach the attention of a criminologist who’s conversant with the case, he reveals the letters contain information that was never released to the public… Is Bethan alive? If so, where is she? Why don’t her letters simply reveal her whereabouts?-- What’s it about? --Agony aunt Margot Lewis is determined to find out what has happened to Bethan and also to Katie Browne, a schoolgirl Margot was teaching who has disappeared in circumstances that she finds eerily reminiscent of Bethan’s history. As Margot researches Bethan’s case, she begins to realise that finding out the truth will demand more of her than she ever imagined.-- What’s it like? --Initially gripping. A little unrealistic. A touch too violent for my liking. The story opens with Katie’s abduction, the development of which gives a very accurate flavour of the rest of the book. It’s chilling, certainly, but perhaps a tad heavy in words and details that could have been edited away without losing the story’s thread. Then we meet Margot, and it quickly becomes clear that she has secrets to hide from a murky past, including significant mental health issues. Not enough baggage for one character? She’s also going through a messy divorce.Margot can be a difficult character to engage with. She’s spiky, paranoid and the very definition of an unreliable narrator, but she’s also determined and nothing will stop her finding Katie and Bethan. The attraction she feels towards the criminologist helping her is a little unsettling and the moments she finds herself admiring his muscles rather than concentrating on his information feel a little out of character for someone so anxious about the world, but this is (sadly) quite standard fare for this kind of fiction. (Of course a woman, especially a vulnerable one, and a man, especially a clever one, can’t work together without fancying each other. *sigh*)The twists and turns in the story are fascinating and were definitely gripping; I lost count of how many times I thought ‘I’ll just read to the end of this chapter…Oooh, ok, just one more chapter…’ I liked most of the developments and thought that, in retrospect, they were understandable without being predictable. I didn’t mind the use of coincidence as the quite specific local settings made the coincidences plausible (though once Margot began to piece together the truth I was quite frustrated that she still didn’t make a particularly likely connection involving a house). What I wasn’t so keen on was the explicit violence towards the end, though I understood the purpose behind showing it, I felt it was a little cartoonish and drew me out of the storyline. There’s a good amount of closure at the end.-- Final thoughts --This is a gripping psychological thriller featuring a seriously unreliable narrator and I mostly enjoyed it. I found some of the time transitions weren’t signalled clearly enough by the paragraphing, but it may be that this is the result of reading a proof copy. I think the book might have benefitted from a few more cuts. Once we realise a few key facts, the whole story of Bethan’s kidnapping is revealed in detail, but this didn’t add anything to my understanding of the killer, the victim or the case. In fact, a lengthier outing for the villain mostly made me wonder how someone so clearly deranged had escaped capture for so long!Worth a read for the gripping pace and the chill factor but this is not a killer who’ll be haunting your mind after you close the pages.Many thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for providing me with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.