Friend Request by Laura Marshall

Louise is a single mother to little Henry and, approaching her high school reunion, receives a Facebook friend request from her old classmate, Maria. Only, Maria died 25 years ago, and the memory of the events leading up to this haunt Louise. She gets in contact with old classmates to try to figure out who this mysterious Facebook user could be, and things become increasingly threatening.

This book is highly rated on Good Reads and has a bunch of top reviews, but I just couldn’t get into it. In some ways, I think it’s me and not the book – I’m just a bit fed up with books set in schools where girls drop their old, daggy friends for the new cool kids and it descends into bullying – I wasn’t a fan of it in Heathers (oh, I really need to watch that film again) and I seem to have read it in a lot of books recently. Does it really happen, or certainly does it happen often enough to be in so many books?

Having said that, being a thriller there needed to be twists and surprises, and while I kept thinking I knew what was going to happen, I didn’t pick most of it. I reckon it will make a decent suspense film, though I can’t see any suggestion that this is going to happen. There is a German film of this name, but it seems quite different.