Yasmin, a fifteen-year-old girl still struggling with the death of her father years before, is overweight and obsessed with a girl in her class, Alice Taylor. When she spots a man ogling Alice, she believes that he is a paedophile who plans to harm her. Yasmin vows to ingratiate herself in his life in order to make sure he doesn't hurt her. When Alice unexpectedly goes missing, however, Yasmin's loyalties are tested.
Tropes present in this novel:
- Break the Haughty: Katie is an Alpha Bitch (though the extent to which this is true is possibly exaggerated), and becomes gradually hysterical, concluding the novel a sobbing mess, after Alice's disappearance.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- Alice's hairband. Yasmin picks it up, it's mentioned offhandedly, then she suddenly remembers it when the police tell her that they found Alice's hair in Gary's van.
- Alice's sketchbook. Yasmin admires it in the novel, then it comes back later when she finds it on a heap of burning rubbish at Sam's house, confirming that he killed her.
- Deceased Parents Are the Best: Yasmin tells her mother You Should Have Died Instead, and it seems to be motivated by the fact that she was only ever happy when her father was still alive.
- Depraved Bisexual: Yasmin appears to be a Psycho Lesbian and is actually called that by bullies, but her attraction to Sam suggests that her attraction towards Alice is just part of her possibly being bisexual and her desperation to have anyone who likes her.
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Esoteric Happy Ending: Acknowledged as such. Alice is dead, having been horribly murdered, Sam got away with it, and he seems about to groom Yasmin into finding him a new victim — but Yasmin is happy that she finally has a friend. - Fictional Fan, Real Celebrity: Yasmin is a big fan of Star Trek: The Original Series, and goes so far as to consider Spock and Kirk's friendship inspiration for her own life and badly-thwarted methods of making friends.
- Has a Type: Sam seems to like young blonde women, if the other disappeared teenage girl in Nottingham Yasmin hears about is any indication.
- I Can Explain: Yasmin does a variant of this when Alice's friends confront her about stalking Alice. See Poor Communication Kills.
- I Just Want to Have Friends: Yasmin's Start of Darkness seems to have begun when she didn't properly deal with her father's death, which resulted in her total isolation from all her friends.
- Loners Are Freaks: It's the case for both Yasmin and Sam, the man she sees watching Alice. Yasmin is a stalker and Sam is a murderer.
- MacGuffin: Alice's hairband, which results in Gary's arrest and drives he and Yasmin's mother, Jennifer, away from her, despite being genuinely an innocent accident on Yasmin's part.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The dream Yasmin has after Alice goes missing. A product of her obsession, or a hint that Alice really is buried in the forest, like her dream suggests?
- Morality Pet: The dog Bea for both Sam and Yasmin, but it doesn't qualify as Pet the Dog because it leads Yasmin right into the murderous Sam's orbit.
- Never a Runaway: Invoked by Yasmin.
- When she sees Sam stalking Alice, she looks for other people he might've kidnapped and comes across Amelia Bell on a missing persons website. She looks uncannily like Alice, and Yasmin immediately jumps to the conclusion that Sam might have killed her, even though she's described as a runaway.
- She also briefly hopes that Alice might have run away, but quickly accepts differently in the face of the enormous amount of evidence otherwise (namely, that her kidnapping was witnessed by other people, and that she dropped her phone during the struggle).
- Not the First Victim: Implied in the search Yasmin does for "missing people". She finds Amelia Bell missing from Nottingham and is shocked by how much Amelia looks like Alice, and Sam says he lived further north. It's never answered for sure if Sam killed Amelia, but it's implied that he may have done.
- Only the Leads Get a Happy Ending: A very relative example. Alice is abducted and presumably raped and murdered and her friends and family end up devastated. Yasmin's family is also destroyed by the suggestion that Gary is the murderer, which might be a cloud of suspicion that never lifts. But Yasmin and Sam get away with the murder of Alice, and are both free to kill again, and have each other.
- Poor Communication Kills: If only Katie had given Yasmin a chance to explain what she meant by the "man following Alice", Alice may not have been kidnapped and murdered - if that's indeed what happened and Yasmin's relationship with her family would not have been ruined by Katie's wrongful assumption that the man Yasmin was referring to was her stepfather.
- Spiritual Successor: Kavanagh referred to the book as one to The Collector.
- Stalker with a Crush: Yasmin towards Alice, and Yasmin thinks Sam is also this. And she's right.
- Teens Are Monsters: Alice's friends are real bullies, but you also can't blame them for disliking Yasmin, who is an unrepentant stalker.
- Unreliable Narrator: Yasmin is a dangerous fantasist.
- Wicked Stepfather: Gary, although Yasmin often implies he's not quite as bad as she makes him out to be, but they clearly clash on every level.
