Book Review: DYING FOR CHRISTMAS BY TAMMY COHEN

My Thoughts on this brilliant and chilling psychological thriller ......


DYING FOR CHRISTMAS
BY
TAMMY COHEN


Published:  20 Nov 2014


I am missing. Held captive by a blue-eyed stranger. To mark the twelve days of Christmas, he gives me a gift every day, each more horrible than the last. The twelfth day is getting closer. After that, there'll be no more Christmas cheer for me. No mince pies, no carols. No way out .

But I have a secret. No-one has guessed it. Will you?

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The book opens on Christmas Eve in a department store cafe on Oxford Street, narrated by Jessica, she begins to tell us how a stranger approaches her, he sits down, they get chatting and she then makes the worst decision of her life to go back to his flat with him.....this sets up the shocking events of the next 12 days of Christmas.

Dominic Lacey, the stranger, holds her prisoner in his flat where she is subject to acts of cruelty and mind games, and is given a beautifully wrapped but utterly creepy present every day.  Every time he gives her the gift she is told the story behind it, often chilling, and she dreads each one, not knowing what to expect.

Both Dominic and Jessica are outsiders in life, even her own brothers called her weird and last Christmas Jessica's parents bought her six sessions with a therapist!

Interspersed with Jessica's captivity, there is the story of Kim, the police officer assigned to the case of looking for the missing woman who has her own domestic problems.

I knew that Jessica had a secret, as the blurb tells us, but what it is is not revealed until part two where the story takes us in a whole different and totally unexpected direction. Brilliant!  

This story had shocks, twists, secrets, revenge, all wonderfully written and I was hooked from beginning to end.  Dominic was your worst nightmare, he was a frightening figure, taking pleasure in Jessica's pain, sometimes I found it difficult to read but I couldn't stop, I just had to keep reading to find out how it all would all end for Jessica.

To say much more about the plot would spoil it, and I want readers to be as surprised as I was.  Yes, some of the story I did find a tad unbelievable, but, overall, for me, in the end that didn't matter.  This was a gripping, psychological thriller that kept me turning the pages.

Tammy Cohen is a writer that I shall be looking out for in the future.

My thanks to NetGalley for this ebook in exchange for an honest review.

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 Available from Amazon UK - Amazon US - Book Depository

 About the Author

Tammy Cohen (who was previously published under her formal name Tamar Cohen) is a freelance journalist. A late starter to fiction - and to other things besides - she has now written four novels:The Mistress's Revenge, The War of the Wives, Someone Else's Wedding, and The Broken. Now embarking on psychological suspense, Dying for Christmas, her Christmas chiller, is just published to wide acclaim. She lives in North London with her partner and three (nearly) grown children, plus one very badly behaved dog. Follow her on Twitter @MsTamarCohen