A Simple Favour is a twisting free-fall ride filled with betrayal, reversal, secrets and revelations, love and loyalty. Darcey Bell ratchets up the tension in a taut, unsettling, and completely absorbing thriller that holds you in its grip until the final page.

It starts with a simple favour - an ordinary kindness mothers do for one another.

When her best friend, Emily, asks Stephanie to pick up her son from school she happily says yes.
Their children are classmates and best friends. And five-year-olds love being together - just like she and Emily. As a widow and stay-at-home blogger mum living in suburban Connecticut, Stephanie was lonely until she met Emily, a glamorous and successful PR executive.

The trouble is that Emily doesn't come back. No matter what the police say, Stephanie knows that she would never leave her son. Terrified, she reaches out to her fellow mummy bloggers.

And she also reaches out to Emily's husband - just to offer her support.

What Stephanie hasn't shared are the secrets buried in a murky past.

'That was when it occurred to me - not quite in a flash, more like a flicker - that Emily might have walked away. Left her son with me and taken off. People walk away. It happens. Their friends and neighbours and family members say they never ever suspected.'

'Sly, satirical, subversive: a deliciously poisoned cupcake of a story'
L. S. Hilton, author of Maestra

A compellingly creepy female protagonist who kept me guessing right up to the end