Spoilers Ahead: 

This book is an absolutely delicious read, and I read it quite quickly… it was so hard to put down! Allan did a really good job on this book. 

We follow Marion, Nell’s mother, and an anonymous POV of a male that is a little… unhinged, shall we say? Marion finds out that her daughter is missing, and enlists the police to help find her. 

Meanwhile, this anonymous guy is getting a thrill out of ‘putting women in their place’ (he thinks that the double standards are unfair, and he’s trying to make sure women know that they are a lot less than men) by running after them in the dark and scaring them. He posts it to - what I describe as - an ‘alpha male’ forum, and he starts videoing his thrill of scaring the girls at night. He starts a trend, fighting for men’s rights, and other men start copying him. 

One of the girls he videoed was Claire, and a guy called Derra messages him, asking him if they could team up. This guy is a psycho, our anonymous guy thinks, so he doesn’t want anything to do with it. But, then he sees Nell in one of his videos, and he had to try and take her. 

This Derra guy was inspired by the anonymous POV man’s trend (we find out he’s actually part of the police, and was even working on Nell’s case until his conscience got too guilty and he had to come clean) and he plays a game with his victims. He worked at the hospital where Nell and his other victim did, and if they didn’t play the game by his rules (although no one knew what his rules were) he punished them. He killed one girl, because she didn’t listen. And the only reason Nell was at his place was because she took pity on him. 

Marion and her husband - who really haven’t been happy for years because he’s a condescending asshole - try to get to the bottom of what happened to their only daughter, but all they can do is wait. When they eventually find the forums, they know nell is going to be used in a livestream, and they used Adam - the anonymous POV guy - as a scapegoat to get Derra to open up, and hopefully to save Nell. 

She’s almost given up, but Adam helps her to escape by giving her access to the keys whilst Derra - Ed - is doing his egotistical rant to his toxic viewers. She manages to escape because Adam sets the place they’re in on fire, and then Nell almost dies, but luckily she is found by the paramedics. Her father, whom she didn’t get along with anyway, leaves her and her mum to it. They’re both happier than they’ve ever been before, and Nell focuses on righting her life. 

A beautiful story. I was really unsure whether a man had written this at the start, because there seemed to be so much misogyny, and so much hatred towards women, it was actually a little disgusting to read at times, so I suppose that’s a good thing. Adam is a despicable character, and although his character arced, the damage was already done, but that prick, Marion’s husband, can suck out. I had enough of reading about him and his whiny attitude, and same with Ed and his other cronies. Everything that he was preaching was just proving why women need to stand up for their rights, but this isn’t a conversation to be having on Storygraph. I will leave you with one last point though, I'm glad Marion is finally getting the life she deserves. 
Overall, I thought this book was really chilling and unsettling, and I really enjoyed reading it. I do think her living at the end is a bit of a cop-out, because she quite obviously died, so I don’t know what that was about, but I was enraptured throughout, and I would definitely recommend!