Although I had quite a few books to read, I couldn’t stay away from the Six Stories series. So I borrowed the third book, Changeling, and was BLOWN AWAY. I am going to be talking about the series so far in general, so I would recommend you click away from this page right now if avoiding spoilers is important to you.

Changeling is about the case of Alfie Marsden, the boy who mysteriously disappeared. This dad stopped the car on the Wentshire Forest Pass, claiming to hear a strange noise from the engine but when he returned, he found his son gone from the car. Our podcast host, Scott King, receives an invitation to turn this case into one of his podcast stories and as he digs, he finds himself changing from the impartial narrator to detective, longing to solve this case.

The interesting thing about this book is that although there were a few things that ordinarily would have turned me off the book, I ended up loving it and thinking it was one of the best books of the year! So let’s get to the parts I didn’t like first: I didn’t really like that in the audio logs that precede each chapter, there are occasionally paragraphs written in second person. It makes no sense because if there’s an “audio log” title, I expect all the text after that to be in first person because it’s an audio log. The other thing about the book was that I managed to guess the twist about two-thirds in. I still felt the impact of the ending, but ordinarily this would have made the book less impressive.

I mentioned in my review of the previous book that Wesolowski has written a slightly more open-ended story, where the possibility of the supernatural remains. In Changeling, the book starts out strongly hinting at the supernatural – the episode on the Wentshire Forest was thrilling – but it ends up quite firmly in the human camp because there is a theme to this book.

Actually, there is a theme to each book and I never really realised that until I finished this one! Six Stories was about bullying among teenagers, Hydra was about family abuse, and Changeling is about coercive control. The theme for Changeling is perhaps the most obvious of the three but that doesn’t matter because Wesolowski has brilliantly written an unmasking of a dangerous character, slowly opening the reader’s eyes to the truth. I was definitely still scared at the end, but of a human, not the supernatural.

Changeling was a book I appreciated, which made an impact on me, not just for the story (which was still good) but because of the strength of the characters. Scott King is the most involved in this case out of the three and because he is much more fleshed out, the others feel more fleshed out too. I could really feel the desperation and misery of some of the characters; all of them felt real to me.

This was, honestly, a brilliant book. I didn’t think that you could write a mystery or thriller that so clearly illustrates the powers of coercive control and yet remain so gripping. While I’m going to continue with this series, I really wonder if the next book will be able to live up to this one. This one took me on such an emotional ride that it may be hard for the next one to do the same (or for me not to be searching for the theme of the book, which may end up spoiling the experience!).