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psychological suspense

Book Review: Play Dead

Rating: 4 stars

The doll existed before the kidnapping.

Eighteen months after five-year-old Mia Dawson disappeared, her mother sees her again on a stranger’s livestream. She is sitting at the end of a child-sized table in a yellow chair, surrounded by hyper-realistic dolls, while thousands of viewers watch. The woman behind the camera calls her Annie. Kate knows better. She recognizes the split in Mia’s thumbnail, the notch in her ear, and the tiny details no artist should have been able to recreate by accident.

Nicole Perry has built an enormous online following around her seventeen “children,” complete with birthdays, favorite foods, bedtime routines, family photographs, and personalities her followers know by heart. Annie has been part of that family since before Mia vanished, which should make Kate’s theory impossible. Then the girl moves again. Police search Nicole’s home and find exactly what Nicole says they will find: dolls. Kate is left with one choice. If she wants to know what is really happening inside that house, she has to get close enough to see it for herself.

Using a false name, Kate takes a temporary job inside Nicole’s carefully staged world. Behind the cameras, locked rooms, household rules, and perfectly arranged family moments, she discovers something far worse than a woman obsessed with lifelike dolls. Children are being taught new names, new memories, and new versions of themselves. They learn when they are allowed to move, when they are allowed to speak, and how to become perfectly still when the red light comes on. Beside each living child is a copy convincing enough to take their place.

Mia is alive, but she is no longer the five-year-old Kate has spent eighteen months trying to bring home. The deeper Kate gets into Nicole’s system, the more she realizes that finding her daughter was only the beginning. To get Mia out, Kate will have to survive a house built to make truth look like obsession, convince people who have already been taught what to believe, and face the possibility that loving the child who came home means letting go of the child she lost.

Play Dead is an uncanny psychological horror novel about missing children, manufactured memories, online spectators, and the terrifying power of a story repeated until everyone accepts it as truth. Sometimes the easiest way to hide a child is to put her where everyone can see her.

I received a digital copy of this book through the publisher on NetGalley for an honest review.

Play Dead was an interesting read that kept me engaged from start to finish. What I enjoyed most about this book was getting a glimpse into the world of a woman with such a large online following who collects silicone dolls. A woman who keeps her followers engaged by having them decide for her through her social media platforms when these dolls will eat and where they’ll sleep, not all of them knowing the impact such a choice has on these dolls. Because what some of her followers don’t know is that these silicone dolls look a lot like children who have gone missing. Silicone dolls were created months before these children disappeared, and the children were taught to behave like the dolls, so when the cameras rolled with them on the screen, the children were always hiding in plain sight so nobody would suspect anything was amiss. Learning how Nicole was able to accomplish this brought chills up and down my spine as I was reading Play Dead, but it also kept me engaged in the story as I wanted to see how this book would come to an end and all these children would be saved and brought home.

What also kept me reading was Kate. Yes, she annoyed me at times when she didn’t listen to the detective who was trying to help her with rescuing her daughter, but I also completely understood why. Kate figured out early on from watching that video that was sent to her about Nicole that the doll that looked like Mia was her daughter from very few fragments and didn’t want to take the chance of losing any opportunity she had to get her daughter back. So when an opening for getting into Nicole’s house came up, it made perfect sense that she jumped at the chance to take it. I also enjoyed that she did this too because it allowed us as the reader to get to see the inner workings of Nicole’s world when it came to the setup of her house with the dolls. Also, when she realized her daughter wasn’t the only one trapped in Nicole’s house, she decided she wanted to do everything she could to save all the children that were trapped in her house no matter what it took. So no matter what she did that annoyed me throughout the book, that right there made up for it for me.   

I also enjoyed getting to see the dynamic between Kate, Mia, and the other two children who were in the house, Caleb and Sophie, as they were doing the best they could to get out of Nicole’s clutches. I know all of the children were doing the best they could to survive such awful circumstances, playing by Nicole’s messed-up rules when it came to everything they could and couldn’t do in the house. Which is why, when certain scenarios happened in the book, I wasn’t at all surprised by them and wasn’t upset with the child involved because they were just trying to survive a situation they found themselves in.

If there was anything about Play Dead I was annoyed with in particular, it would be how detailed the story would get at times. While I understood needing to know what was going on in Nicole’s house along with the rules these children had to live by, there were times when I felt like there was almost too much detail in this book. I get that certain aspects of the story need details, but there was certain information I was perfectly fine not needing to know that I felt like bogged down the story. It was great to find out, though, how all of this even started to begin with, so I appreciated that information being included here.

I also wasn’t the biggest fan of the ending either. Mostly because I wanted there to be more of what happened after the children got out of Nicole’s house. And I feel like the book just ends all of a sudden with no real conclusion that’s satisfactory to me as a reader.

Overall, though, I enjoyed reading Play Dead as it brought chills down my spine in a good way, and I never knew, with each page, the direction the story was going to go. I highly recommend this book to those wanting to read books with a thrilling mystery, especially anyone who enjoys reading books about missing children, as well as those who like books that involve people who livestream. And I think anyone who enjoys horror books involving dolls will enjoy this book too. Play Dead was published on September 22, 2026, for those interested in giving this book a read.

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Book Review: In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad #1)

In the Woods Book Cover

Rating: 3 stars

A gorgeously written novel that marks the debut of an astonishing new voice in psychological suspense.

As dusk approaches a small Dublin suburb in the summer of 1984, mothers begin to call their children home. But on this warm evening, three children do not return from the dark and silent woods. When the police arrive, they find only one of the children. He is gripping a tree trunk in terror, wearing blood-filled sneakers and unable to recall a single detail of the previous hours.

Twenty years later, the found boy, Rob Ryan, is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad and keeps his past a secret. But when a 12-year-old girl is found murdered in the same woods, he and Detective Cassie Maddox (his partner and closest friend) find themselves investigating a case chillingly similar to the previous unsolved mystery. Now, with only snippets of long-buried memories to guide him, Ryan has the chance to uncover both the mystery of the case before him and that of his own shadowy past.

As a crime scene novel, this book perfectly depicted how investigators solve crimes. There was just enough mystery and suspense to keep me interested in finding out what Ryan and his partner Cassie discovered. The writing was the perfect tone, adding to the suspense when needed, and describing the setting of the world around Ryan in perfect detail. It made me engaged, wanting to know more about what happened. Also enjoyed that the setting took place in Ireland because I haven’t read too many novels that take place in other countries. So it’s always interesting reading books like this where the setting isn’t somewhere I’m familiar with.

I also enjoyed hearing more about Ryan’s past. While he’s definitely not my favorite detective in this book, I loved learning more about the trauma he went through and understanding how that shaped him into the character read about in the book. I also enjoyed his friendship with Cassie, my favorite character in the book. I found both of them together as partners to be very amusing when solving crimes because they had amazing chemistry.

But while I enjoyed these aspects of In the Woods, there were so many things with this novel too that left me criticizing it. For one, Ryan’s character wasn’t great. When I first started reading this book, I didn’t mind him all that much. But the more I read, the less I liked him. I think my disdain for him is because of the way he acts with Cassie and the way he talks about his past. After everything they’ve been through together and Ryan saying Cassie is his best friend, he lets their friendship go without a fight over the dumbest thing. He ruins his friendship with her instead of trying to talk things out like responsible adults are supposed to do. And she tries to set things right, but he wants nothing more to do with her until it’s too late. That really bothers me because she was his best friend, yet he doesn’t act like it after what happened. I also don’t like the way he talks about his past because he’s never let go of the one mystery surrounding his childhood, the one he has the opportunity of solving only to let it slip through his fingers. I get his memory of events is skewered, but when he’s given the chance to solve the crime that has literally changed his life, he doesn’t put his best effort into it. He starts remembering some of the events that came before, but doesn’t even push himself to figure out what happened.

I also don’t like how the main case in this story was solved. There were so many mistakes made during the investigation that it took a lot longer for them to solve the crime if they’d looked in certain places at the very beginning. I also didn’t like who they chose as the scapegoat for the crimes because the person who actually came up with the idea got away with it completely.

To be honest, I was completely disappointed by the end of the story. There was so much buildup that I was expecting things to end differently. But that wasn’t the case at all. Instead, things change for the worse and the mysterious crime that occurred during the narrator’s childhood is never solved, despite the flashbacks in the past he experienced.

So while I enjoyed reading In the Woods, there were a lot of things in the story that left me disappointed, wanting more than what was given. Nonetheless, I plan on reading the second book in this series The Likeness in hopes that it’ll be a better read.

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