#BlogTour: Stop At Nothing by Tammy Cohen @MsTamarCohen @TransworldBooks @GrayBookworm @AnneCater #StopAtNothing #RandomThingsTour

I was so thrilled to have been sent a proof copy of Stop At Nothing by Tammy Cohen, by Frankie Gray at Transworld Books. Then when I found out that Anne was organising the tour, it felt very win win! So thank-you both for the proof and the place on-board the tour! Stop At Nothing is a slicing domestic thriller that was published on the 18th of July in e-book format, which you can purchase here. Unfortunately, for all you physical book lovers, it won’t be published in physical form until the 26th of December! You can pre-order yourself a post Christmas gift here!

This isn’t Tammy Cohen’s first bookish rodeo, she has previously, under the name Tamar Cohen, written several acclaimed novels about family fall-out: The Mistress’s Revenge, The War of the Wives, and Someone Else’s Wedding. The Broken was her first psychological thriller, followed by Dying for Christmas. Her brand new hardback novel, First One Missing is out now. Tammy lives in North London with her partner and three (nearly) grown children, plus one badly behaved dog. Chat with her on Twitter @MsTamarCohen

A mother’s job is to keep her children safe.
Tess has always tried to be a good mother. Of course, there are things she wishes she’d done differently, but doesn’t everyone feel that way?
Then Emma, her youngest, is attacked on her way home from a party, plunging them into a living nightmare which only gets worse when the man responsible is set free
But what if she fails?
So when Tess sees the attacker in the street near their home, she is forced to take matters into her own hands. But blinded by her need to protect her daughter at any cost, might she end up putting her family in even greater danger?
There’s nothing she wouldn’t do to make it right . . .

The notes that I made while reading Stop At Nothing penned a little over an A4 piece of lined paper because I didn’t want to miss anything in the review, this intoxicatingly gritty thriller deserves to be reviewed in all it’s glory and I have tried to make sure that’s exactly what I do. What I wasn’t aware of before I had read Stop At Nothing is that Tammy took a truly frightening attack that her daughter fell victim to as the novel’s foundation, then built fictionally upon it. This created a more chilling undercurrent of this thriller because there is a small part of authenticity.

The main protagonist of Stop at Nothing is Tess, a mother who is suffering the inner turmoil of guilt and anger after her teenage daughter is spontaneously attacked while waiting for her bus after a party. Tess has over recent years experienced a divorce, becoming estranged from her oldest daughter Rosie and is currently battling against the unbearable symptoms of oncoming menopause. Her life is thrown into a hurricane of powerlessness and judgement when her daughter Emma observes her attacker close to her home, Tess stops at nothing to turn the tables on the accused and becomes the predator. Or so she believes, while hunting the person who attacked her daughter down, is she helping or merely dragging her family into the deeper depths of danger? It’s quite literally the ingredient of every mother’s nightmare, at first I felt that Tess had become increasingly erratic and paranoid, she begins forgetting things and panicking at the worst times, you can’t help but have a soft spot for her, I think every parent would act in a similar manner.

I noticed early on in the book that Emma’s father wasn’t a huge part of the narrative, he floated around the background and I didn’t understand why. It felt as though there was no safety net for Tess and because of that, we see a wave of her silent motherly rage being released in a grippingly startling turn of events. Stop At Nothing is a fast paced read with a number of revelations, cliff-hanger and gasp moments thrown in that helps to create a razor sharp storyline that will satisfy every thriller fan! We are kept guessing until the very last thread is tied up in a jaw droppingly perfect bow, that’s carefully crafted in a neck-breaking speed.

With her words, Tammy lulled me into a domestic thriller that grasped me and dragged me down a rabbit hole of obsession, where the initial slow burning ride sped up to a fully taut ride that teetered on the edge of what felt like a psychological break. Although Tess comes across as delusional and paranoid at times, I could see myself in her shoes, as a mother hunting down an individual who hurt their baby! I flew through this thriller at a whiplash speed. The inclusion of an unknown narrative didn’t only quicken the pace of the novel, but also my heart – with the accompaniment of prickled skin and hairs standing up, I fully enjoyed Stop at Nothing and would recommend it to all you thriller fans out there!