The Stepchild by Nicole Trope #bookreview #thriller

**This post contains Amazon affiliate links which will allow me as an associate to earn a small commision on any purchase made through the link of the products I share. This commission in no way changes the pricing of any items for the buyer.**

Title: The Stepchild

Author: Nicole Trope

Publisher: Bookouture

Publication Date: March 15, 2022

Page Count: 276

My rating: 4 stars

About the book:

Three-year-old Millie Everleigh disappears on a crisp winter’s day, and nothing is as it seems…

It’s the phone call every mother dreads.

I’m climbing into the car after a trip to the grocery store. As the engine starts, my phone rings. It’s my stepdaughter, Shelby, who is babysitting my three-year-old little girl Millie.

‘I only went upstairs for a second,’ she says through her sobs. ‘She’s gone.’

I race home to find my blue-eyed baby girl missing, and my heart ripped out of my chest.

When the police turn up, Shelby’s story starts to unravel. What is she hiding?

Then I get a message saying, ‘Your husband is not who you think he is.’ Could he be lying?

Suddenly, my family feel like strangers. Everyone has a secret – even me.

No one knows why I was late coming back from the store, and the guilt I’ve been feeling ever since…

Once the truth comes out, all of our lies exposed, will it be too late to save my precious child?

A pulse-pounding psychological thriller about family secrets, shocking pasts and the lies we tell ourselves in order to survive. Perfect for fans of Lisa Jewell, Liane Moriarty and The Wife Between Us.

The Stepchild by Nicole Trope is a psychological thriller novel that features every parent’s nightmare, a missing child. The story in The Stepchild is one that is told by changing the point of view between the various characters involved.

Leslie gets the news that no parent ever wants to hear, her three year old daughter Millie is missing. Leslie had gone out and left Millie with her twelve year stepdaughter, Shelby, there to babysit but when returning home Millie is gone and Shelby insists she had only left for a second.

Nicole Trope has done a good job in The Stepchild making every character the type that you just know they are hiding something and that feel very untrustworthy. This of course is the type of book that then becomes hard to put down as it pulls me in further and further waiting for the answers to just what happened. Having read the author before I knew I enjoyed her stories and hoped The Stepchild would grab me too and it certainly did as each twist came along.

I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.

Find this book online:

Goodreads  /   Amazon

About the author:

Nicole Trope went to university to study Law but realised the error of her ways when she did very badly on her first law essay because-as her professor pointed out- ‘It’s not meant to be a story.’ She studied teaching instead and used her holidays to work on her writing career and complete a Masters’ degree in Children’s Literature.

The idea for her first published novel, The Boy under the Table, was so scary that it took a year for her to find the courage to write the emotional story. She went on to publish a further five novels in Australia before joining Bookouture in 2019. She is a USA Today and Amazon bestseller in the USA, UK, AUS and CAN.

She lives in Sydney with her husband and three children.