What better way to cosy down this fall and winter than with a few thrillers while the wind is howling around your house and the branches scraping against your window, making you feel like someone is trying to get in?
If you don’t know where to start, try the Social Media Murder Series by Angela Clarke. Set against the backdrop of gritty London with its hardworking masses, the series asks the question: What if a serial killer dropped clues about their next steps on social media?
And really, it’s not such an implausible scenario. With anyone and almost everyone online these days, you just don’t know the identity of the last person who viewed your Twitter or the one whose Instagram post you just liked.
Read the synopsis of each of the books below:
Social Media Murders #1 – Follow Me
Two young women who share a past secret—one now an ambitious journalist, the other a cop—must join forces to stop a vicious killer no matter the risk in this nail-biting debut from an international bestselling author.
Recent graduate Freddie Venton is desperate to get her journalism career started. She cultivates contacts online, writes for free for digital publications, and earns minimum wage as a barista. She’s been taught to “seize the story,” and she takes a reckless chance when a face from her past leads to a juicy scoop.
Freddie hasn’t seen her old friend Nasreen Cudmore in years. But when she learns Nasreen is a police officer after a chance encounter outside her coffee shop, Freddie makes a snap decision to follow her when Nasreen gets an urgent callout. Impersonating a forensics officer, Freddie visits Nasreen’s crime scene where a man’s body lies slumped over his computer. With the police banned from, and unfamiliar with, social media, it’s Freddie who realises the victim was a troll and finds @Apollyon: a Twitter account whose profile picture shows the dead body and the missing murder weapon.
The “Hashtag Murderer” posts cryptic clues online, pointing to the next target—taunting the police, enthralling the press and the public. When @Apollyon follows her, Freddie’s afraid she might be next. Time is running out as she and Nasreen face a desperate struggle to catch this cunning, fame-crazed killer—and to escape their past demons in Follow Me.
Social Media Murders #2 – Watch Me
YOU HAVE SIX SECONDS TO READ THIS MESSAGE…
The body of a 15-year-old is found hours after she sends a desperate message to her friends. It looks like suicide, until a second girl disappears.
This time, the message is sent directly to the Metropolitan Police – and an officer’s younger sister is missing.
DS Nasreen Cudmore and journalist Freddie Venton will stop at nothing to find her. But whoever’s behind the notes is playing a deadly game of hide and seek—and the clock is ticking.
YOU HAVE 24 HOURS TO SAVE THE GIRL’S LIFE.
MAKE THEM COUNT.
Social Media Murders #3 – Trust Me
What do you do if you witness a murder—but no one believes you?
When Kate sees a horrific murder streamed live on her laptop, she calls the police in a state of shock. But when they arrive, the video has disappeared – and she can’t prove anything. Desperate to be believed, Kate tries to find out who the girl in the video could be – and who her killer is.
Freddie and Nas are working on a missing persons case, but tensions in the police force are running high and time is ticking. When Kate contacts them, they are the only ones to listen and they start to wonder – are the two cases connected?
Dark, gripping, and flawlessly paced, Trust Me is the brilliant third novel in the hugely popular social media murderer series.
Two Heroines: Freddie Venton and Nasreen Cudmore
The Social Media Murder Series follows two heroines, Freddie Venton and Nasreen Cudmore—once childhood friends, but who fell apart when they grew up. Freddie Venton works odd jobs in a desperate attempt to pay the bills while writing a column in a weekly webzine. Nasreen Cudmore is a police officer whose life Freddie suddenly upends when she enters a murder scene Nasreen is investigating.
Freddie isn’t your typical heroine. She can be a bit uncomfortable to read, with her temper and tendency to be stubborn. She’s rash, often acts without thinking but manages to get away with it by sheer luck. She does, however, let you see life from inside the police station from the perspective of someone who isn’t part of the system.
She questions the red tape, the politics, and their way of distancing themselves from the horror that they face from time to time, especially with a serial killer on the loose.
Nasreen Cudmore is the opposite of Freddie. She has worked hard to get where she is and refuses to break rules just to do what she (or Freddie) wants. The result is a clashing of wills between the two girls, where neither of them is willing to back down.
Nevertheless, Freddie and Nasreen work well together, as you will discover the more you flip through the pages of the books. Their past experiences lend to the cases they solve, and despite their differences, they find a compromise and understanding which helps them as they race against time to find the victims.
True to Life?
Watch Me may bring to mind Netflix documentary recently released, entitled Cyber Hell. This Netflix documentary uncovers the horrendous story of the Telegram chatrooms—where dozens of women and girls fell victim to two nameless, faceless people who would demand for nude photos and upload them on the chatrooms.
Like Cyber Hell, Watch Me exposes the dangers lurking in the internet world. The perpetrator is someone who knows how to hack into the phones of the victims to gather photos and then use them as a means to manipulate the women. In both the documentary and the book, the girls are forced to take more and more nude photos of themselves and submit them, as the perpetrators threaten to tell their families.
While the crimes are horrifying to digest, they also serve as a word of warning about the dangers when it comes to using the internet.
A Word of Warning
Follow Me, Watch Me, and Trust Me can be a little disturbing to read. Some of the scenes are written in a rather graphic manner, and they are so vividly described that you can see them in your mind’s eye. It also features several adult themes. This series isn’t for the faint of heart. We advise young audiences to proceed with caution.
