Reputation by Sarah Vaughan
I would like to thank Anne from Random Things Tours and Simon & Schuster for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher – Simon and Schuster
Published – Out Now
Price - £14.99 hardback £6.99 Kindle eBook
Emma Webster is a respectable MP.
Emma Webster is a devoted mother.
Emma Webster is innocent of the murder of a tabloid journalist.
Emma Webster is a liar.
Our personal sense of value can be our motivation and our undoing. We all want to be thought of well but what if you found someone was trying to undermine you or your loved ones. How far do you go to avoid a scandal? Will people want to honourable, selfish or will bias win out. In Reputation by Sarah Vaughan, we get a topical thriller where a domino chain of people trying to do the right thing goes horribly wrong.
Emma Webster is an increasingly prominent Labour back bencher MP. From an unexpected election win she is making a name for various policies but with a current focus on better protection against revenge porn. But just as the focus is on her at a national level her fourteen-year-old daughter Flora is a victim of online bullying at school makes a horrible mistake for repercussions not just for herself, but her mother and it sets off a catalogue of events ultimately leading to an unexplained death and Emma becoming a prime suspect.
Reading Reputation is a bit like watching snooker balls all suddenly hit hard by the cue ball and everything flies part rebounding off one another in unexpected ways. We initially see Emma currently balancing the scrutiny of the press, constituency pressures, family issues and most scarily online harassment and abuse. Increasingly Emma feels someone is watching her. Flora is feeling lost with divorced parents, estranged friendships and becoming a teenager. Into the mix comes Michael Stokes a well -regarded veteran reporter who has worked with Emma in the past and these recent events pose an opportunity and threat. The reader soon sees everything collide and each character thinks what they do is for the best of reasons, and this creates a huge collision of best intentions as everyone tries to save either their own or someone else’s reputation. Sometimes though we see being selfish can be the worst decision of all
What really works in this story is how Vaughan shows the environment these characters live in. We see the online taunts sent to Emma, the precautions that all MPs take to be safe and then as the story widens out then we get the added pressure of the press, schools, and imploding family relationships. The first half of the book leads up to the disaster that swallows up Emma and then the rest of the story involves a tense court case and slowly unpicking for the reader hat actually happened and how all these character’s perfectly reasonable decisions led to a disaster. It feels very much a story that happens in our current world, and you could easily imagine the media circus and the online scandal taking place if this was real that itself explains various characters actions. I would though possibly have liked at the start a little more chance to see Emma prior to all this because everything going wrong tends to make her feel a little hapless and while very often we tend to see her as the victim I never felt her take the lead until later despite being our main narrator.
Reputation is a thriller that uses today’s issues of online sexism, harassment and our reactions to those in power to give the reader a knotty tangle of conflicting stories to get towards the truth. An interesting read that those who enjoy tense legal thrillers will very likely enjoy.
