Wow! An audiobook that’s well narrated, emotive, interesting characters and twists and turns to keep you on the edge of your seat.
You won’t be disappointed.
My thanks to NetGalley and Harper Audio UK for the opportunity to listen and review.

Brilliant, stormed through it. Gripping plot and characters. Good narration, didn't detract from the story and was easy to listen to. Thanks.

A fantastic read. A great storyline bringing every parents’ worst fear to life, the disappearance of a child’. I felt like I was right there with Alex going through her suffering with her.
A definite recommendation for thriller/ mystery fans.

Alex takes her daughter to a wedding in America
Lottie disappears from the reception
Alex’s world falls apart
Will she ever get her daughter back
What a fantastic book
Loved this from start to finish
Plenty of twists and turns
Brilliantly narrated
Thanks NetGalley

Sooooooo many red herrings! It's not always easy to get into an audio book quickly, I find (and this is me) I really have to concentrate on what's going on and it's not until I'm thirty minutes in that I can relax and understand what's going on. With Stolen it took half that time to find myself invested in not only the book but the characters involved.

Told almost in its entirety by one narrator, who by the way did a sterling job, the book flows effortlessly and as a listener you can't help but go through a range of emotions. Do I like her, do I despise her, do I feel sorry for her? Everyone is different I throughout the book I went through every scenario possible!

I couldn't help but think of Madelaine McCann throughout and I'll leave the ending to you, the jury is still out on that one for me! Very enjoyable listen, great narration and so many miss-directions!

Wow...wait a minute as I catch my breath. Captivating, complex, gripping and absolutely unputdownable.

Alexa Martini, a single mother grieving the loss of her husband travels to Florida to attend her best friend Marc's wedding. What was meant to be a celebration turns into a nightmare for Alexa when her three year old daughter, Lottie Martini disappears. With the international press labelling her a bad mother, Alexa sets on the arduous and heart-rending journey trying to find her daughter. Could it be someone she knew or a stranger?

This was my first experience listening to an audio book and I'm now truly hooked. The narration was brilliant. Stephanie Racine does an absolutely remarkable job of bringing the characters and the story to life.

Filled with suspense and twists that keep on coming, Stolen by Tess Stimson is totally riveting!

I listened to this audio book and found it a well narrated and compelling story. Alex, a career driven single mum, travels to Florida with her three year old daughter to attend a friend's wedding. All goes well until her daughter goes missing. As she and the police try to piece everything together, the reader is taken through lots of twists and turns. I was kept guessing all the way through. Thank you to Tess Stimson, Net Galley and Harper Collins UK Audio for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Stolen by Tess Stimson Narrated by: Stephanie Racine, Indra Ove, Colin Mace, Aysha Kala, Josie Dunne, Beth Eyre was excellent. I wasn't quite sure at the beginning but once I got into this audio I loved it and I was hooked!
When Alex Martini and her 3-year old daughter, Lottie, travel from London to Florida to attend the wedding of Alex’s friend, Marc. Everything is going swimmingly........The sun is shining and everyone is happy But then, Lottie disappears during the reception.
The authorities are quickly called and the media are on it and its all over the media..........With the local authorities and the public looking for Lottie; Are they going to find her before it's too late?

Wow, this had lots of twists and turns throughout and I really enjoyed it. Not Sure on some of the narrators But I stuck with it and enjoyed it. I felt they did not have the passion behind them like some narrators have when I listen to these audio books.

However, I would recommend the Book But not the audio sorry.

Big Thank you to Avon Books UK via Netgalley for providing an audio of Stolen by Tess Stimson for review.
All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

4.75*

This as another audiobook discovery for those coming-out-of-lockdown walks and I have to say I was gripped by the storyline.

As the novel opens Alex Martini is flying to Florida with her three year old daughter Lottie to attend her good friend's wedding. We already have a peek into their lives and their relationship and it is clear that motherhood is proving quite a challenge for mum - Lottie is quite a headstrong little girl. Alex is a single parent now because Lottie's father died in the Genoa Bridge disaster of 2018.

In Florida, Lottie is going to be a flower girl and the evening prior to the marriage ceremony, there is a dinner party where the characters are introduced. The wedding goes according to plan and the ensuing party gets underway. Alex allows her attention to wander and Lottie is last seen with the other flower girls. It is clear several hours later that Lottie now is missing.

The author is skilled at ratcheting up panic and fear as the hours pass, and there is no sign of the little girl Alex feels that Lottie must have gone with someone familiar, as stranger danger had been drummed into her. And yet, the scary image of abductors, their opportunism and remit keep straying into her consciousness, and she is all too aware of the potential consequences. Alex is a human rights lawyer, who understands fully that there are some truly bad people out there.

Soon Lottie's disappearance is all over the news and even the then President gets involved, sparking outrage (as always). The author highlights the issue that Lottie is a white female and all the stops are pulled out to investigate. Yet there are children of different ethnicities who have also gone missing but who get no coverage whatsoever. Lottie is at the heart of a global investigation and parallels are drawn with the Madeleine McCann case. The journalists soon start to delve into the family's personal circumstances and with a bit of dirt, they have their mileage. The author is also incisive about how people will hijack a story, purely for their own ends, irrespective of the feelings of the parties at the heart.

There are plenty of twists and turns and some good insights into how the press and politicos can exert influence over the trajectory of the story as it unfolds. As time ticks by, Alex's stress becomes intolerable and the author depicts a woman barely coping.

This is a powerful novel that had me on the edge of my seat.

Location, in terms of TripFiction, isn't altogether strong but the author differentiates between the humid heat of Florida and the grey streets of London.

This was a great book to listen to. My it kept you guessing! I won't rewrite the blurb here as others do it better but the important thing to say is that you will not get a better mystery book in a while. I suppose perhaps I could have guessed the ending (but I didn't!). There were so many possibilities and all seemed plausable at one time or another.
A couple of little gripes but please note they were more personal matters.
- The accent used for one character sounded more welsh than Italian!
- Lottie would not behave as she did at 3 years old! Yes it mentions she was advanced for her age but I've been an early years teacher of 2-5year olds for 40 years and I've never met a 3 year old like Lottie at the beginning of this book! Authors special licence to make a point but it annoyed me!

I struggled with this but the ending made me change my mind a little bit, I though I'd worked out who the perpetrator was and I was so wrong!

The narration was whining and over dramatic for me, very irritating. There was also things that weren't researched well. Unimportant but bougainvillea do not have perfume, a simple careless error.

The characters were well formed and the plot improved as it went on. Early on I thought it another book based on the abduction of Madeleine McCann but it turned out to be something very different.

I was glad to be able to listen to the audio version of the book in order to give a review, my thanks to Netgalley and the publisher. I love audio books and listen probably more than read these days. However I think I would have enjoyed reading rather than listening and will therefore recommend itvto my reader friends.

LOVED this! I was hooked from the get go and didn't want it to end. Similarities to the disappearance of Madeline McCann are there in the story but this has been acknowledged there too. I did find the 3 year old too advanced but that wasn't a big deal - the story is gripping. I'll be looking out for Tess Simpson's books in the future and the Narrator was excellent too. Thanks to HarperCollins UK Audio and NetGalley for the chance to listen and review.

Child abduction is every mother's nightmare and this story felt authentic, with several similarities to the real case of Madeline McCann. This is an interesting and engrossing read, with several twists and red-herrings keeping you engrossed and invested in the story.

I liked the fact that Lottie is portrayed as being a bit of a brat before going missing - and the dialogue shows how exasperating this can be as a parent.

In addition to the suspense of missing Lottie, the book also deals with some of the pressures working mothers face and the criticisms women receive about their parenting skills. It also mentions the disparity between the coverage, time and money spent searching for white middle-class children, compared to the effort spent on missing children with darker skins, or from poorer homes.

In my opinion, the ending went a little too far on the unbelievability scale and left what would otherwise have been an exceptional book a little too implausible - up until this point, it's a 5 star read! Despite the ending, it's an excellent read and highly recommended.

A huge thanks to NetGallery and HarperCollins UK Audio for allowing me a copy of the book to review.

Three-year-old Lottie disappears at a beach wedding, and the worst is feared. Before long the court of public opinion falls on the mother, Alex. What kind of mother is she to lose sight of her daughter? Spoiler alert: normal. Until you find out what Alex was doing and then she loses some sympathy. But still. I’m a mom, and know it can happen in the blink of an eye.

I appreciated the message that highlights the pressure on women to be the perfect mother, and the commentary on the criticisms women receive on their parenting skills. While I have empathy, I have zero tolerance for whining and melodramatic prose where a reader is subjected to every overwrought thought of a character.

A narrator who thinks it’s a good idea to ACT out her overwrought emotions in the audio production is like nails on a chalkboard to me.. Her breathy emotional narrative made me want to poke a hole in my eardrums. The very nature of her thought processes is perhaps understandable, but it made them very repetitive.

I was invested enough to finish it, to find out what happened to Lottie, but I didn’t love it. The introduction of a couple of hot button social issues didn’t endear this story to me, nor did the wildly out-of-nowhere implausible ending.

• I received a copy of the audiobook via HarperCollinsUK audio. All opinions are my own.

I really enjoyed this audiobook, the narration was amazing and suited the characters,
Although I felt the missing child theme has been over done this gives a different spin on it and look at the impact missing children can have on family’s, it’s also looks at how the media can impact and also the shocking truth about race, I would definitely recommend

A mother's nightmare. You go to a destination wedding of a close friend, and your daughter is in the wedding party. She is only three, but as she leaves the ceremony to head to the reception, you are not worried. You ask someone in the wedding party to watch out for her and you go off for a bit to enjoy yourself. An hour later, she is missing. Did she wander off? Did someone take her? Alex knows her daughter would never wander off with someone she doesn't know. Why didn't she watch Lottie every second?

This is an emotional, twisty story. Anytime something happens with children, the first person looked at are the parents. If they didn't do it, then it is still their fault for not watching their child closer. Media plays a part in this story both vilifying and supporting Alex. Every time there is a sighting, off she goes to see if it is Lottie. I felt for Alex, especially as time goes one. The other person that plays a huge role in this story is Quinn, a journalist. She uses her contacts, investigative skills and her tenacious attitude to continue to search for Lottie long after her employers and the police have given up. Tess Stimson does an amazing job with this story, keeping my emotions at the surface all the time. I was sure I knew who had taken Lottie, I was positive and I was wrong. The characters in this story were wonderfully developed and described. They were not all likable, but they were realistic. The missing child, Lottie, is spoiled, stubborn, manipulative and a glutton. Alex, her mother, was happy as a wife, but did not want a child. When she was born, her husband Luca looked after her until their divorce and death when he was in a bridge collapse. Of course, she did love her and Lottie had become her world. Quinn, the journalist, is an alcoholic. She was involved in a bombing a few years earlier and became an amputee. She is bitter and angry, but when she gets a tingling in her spine when she is assigned to cover Lottie's abduction, she never gives up. This was a well-written story with tense moments, twists that were unexpected and hope that Lottie will be found unharmed. I was chewing my nails as this story progressed and finally came to a stunning end. Well done Tess Stimson. The cast that narrated this one also did a wonderful job. Some roles were short, such as a podcast announcer, and others took on major roles, but all did a great job adding to my enjoyment of this story.

3.5 stars, rounding up. If you are looking for a book that has more twists than a korker ribbon, this could be a great read for you!

Story:
Alex is a career-oriented lawyer who isn’t really fond of motherhood but loves her three year old to whatever extent she can. Her daughter Lottie is a precocious spoilt brat, with her every word and action revealing her stubbornness and wilfulness. But the mother and daughter still have a trusting connect with each other. So when Lottie disappears from a beach during a fancy wedding, Alex fears the worst and uses every resource she can to discover what happened to her child. Will she be able to find Lottie before it’s too late? Will the media attention on the high-profile case help or make matters worse?

This was my first Tess Stimson book, and it left me with mixed feelings, though my final feelings are a bit skewed towards the positive side. The prologue provides a nice setting for the story, but it also leaks a tiny, albeit misleading, spoiler. The writing style is very quick especially in the first half, but soon it begins to get a little repetitive. There are twists galore, but some of them are quite farfetched. The book provides an equal number of “What???” and “What rubbish!” moments. I don’t want to go too much into spoilers but the rationale provided for some characters who did what they did was just tough to digest. The ending was especially over the top. I prefer thrillers where the twists aren’t easily guessable but still flow logically from the story, thereby giving you the satisfaction of making deductions and enjoying the process of the reveal. I didn’t enjoy the big turnaround twist in this book because it was impossible to guess.

The book covers some themes really well. How white privilege works when it comes to case investigations, how mothers face more flak than fathers, how career-oriented mothers are always asked to get their priorities right… These were all nicely incorporated within the storyline. But not everything is hunky-dory with the plot development. There are some obvious misses by the police investigating the kidnapping and these are quite glaring loopholes. How come experienced police officers miss out on such clear logical gaps that amateurs can detect easily? All is fair in love, war and contemporary thrillers, I guess.

The author’s choice of lead character was intriguing. Alex isn’t the perfect mother nor person. She loves to take personal time away from her daughter. Her career comes first. She’s not very likeable or down-to-earth. As such, she makes for a great protagonist in a thriller because you get mixed feelings about her at once: sympathy at her loss plus irritation at her behaviour. Lottie is interesting too, for whatever pages she appears in. I’ve never seen a three year old depicted in this devious way, and that is a very brave decision by the author. Most of the rest of the characters hardly make any impact as they come and go in the story on an if-need-be basis. The sole exception is Quinn, a journalist who is covering the Lottie kidnapping to get her career back on track. As is the common trope in most thrillers nowadays, there is at least one main character who is a drunken mess for at least a few pages, and in this book, that honour belongs to Quinn and as such, I didn’t like her character.

The audiobook description showed an ensemble cast, and this misled me into thinking that the book has multiple key characters. But the book comes only in two perspectives (Alex 1st person and Quinn 3rd person) and both of these are voiced by the same narrator. (I’m guessing this is Stephanie Racine.) The rest of the voice cast comes only on minor occasions to voice the public opinion on the kidnapping. This was a slight disappointment. Of course, I can’t take away anything from the main narrator’s performance. She was outstanding to listen to in this 11 hour audiobook as she voices Alex and Quinn perfectly. But when you expect a multi-cast production and find only one main narrator, it’s like a let-down.

AUDIOBOOK SPOILER AHEAD: <Spoiler> I didn’t understand the purpose of the scene by scene replay of the two kidnappings. Was it to show that Alex used the same modus operandi as Lottie’s kidnapper? Or were those chapters from Flora’s kidnapping and scattered in the narrative earlier just to provide a misdirection? This didn’t come out clearly in the audiobook.</spoiler>

My rating went was at a steady 4.5 until about halfway in the book, and then it kept going up and down depending on the twist. The ending is what brought my rating down to 3.5 and kept it there.

You will like the book if you like twists that simply can’t be predicted. Overall, this is still one of the better thrillers I’ve read this year and it will be an entertaining read if you don’t question it too much.

Thank you, NetGalley and HarperCollins UK Audio, for the audio ARC of the book in exchange for an honest review.

What a brilliant and at times sad story! In the end, I suspected everyone and I was still wrong! Wow, that was a humdinger of an ending! The narrator was brilliant as well She managed to create so much atmosphere with her voice it felt like I was listening to a movie.

This story is about every parent's nightmare. What do you do when your child disappears. It is impossible to keep an eye on them 24/7. When you are in a secure surrounding with people you know nothing can go wrong or can it? The criticism you have to endure if something like this happens can break people. It is very easy to throw stones if you are not in that position.

This is what happens to Alex when her 3-year-old daughter disappears from a wedding. Nobody has seen anything. She just vanished into thin air. Soon everything Alex does is being scrutinized and people are even suspecting she had something to do with Lottie's disappearance. What happened to Lottie? Will we ever know and is she still alive?

A brilliant listen!

Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Collins UK audio for the chance to listen to the audiobook in exchange for my honest opinion

What makes a true page turner?* For me, it’s often when an author absolutely nails the formula of shorter chapters that each end on mini cliff hangers.

Who writes a true page turner? Tess Stimson! In her latest thriller, Stolen, I never shook the urge to read “just one more chapter.”

The plot certainly isn’t groundbreaking. Single mum Alex loses her young daughter and is naturally shamed for her life choices rather than given the sympathy and support she needs to track down her missing child. Stimson lays out the story in such a way though that readers are never sure what truly happened until the very end, and you want to get there as quickly as possible. Just. One. More. Chapter.

Alas, as many prior readers have pointed out, the ending is a bit of an over-the-top turd. But as with life, books can be more about the journey than the destination.

My journey with Stolen was via the audiobook that’s primarily performed by one female narrator who’s voice seemed a bit more mature than Alex’s 29 years. I probably would have read her differently on the page, but otherwise I enjoyed experiencing the book in this format. I’d like to thank HarperCollins UK Audio and the author for providing me with a gifted review copy via NetGalley.

*Print purists, settle down. I realize that an audiobook doesn’t have literal pages and therefore can’t truly be a “page turner.” If anyone has any suggestions on what the audio equivalent of that is, I’m all ears. ;)

My thanks to Netgalley for my audio copy of Stolen. Overall I enjoyed listening to this book, it had so many twists, turns and red herrings that at times it went on for a bit longer than I hoped. It was incredibly frustrating when a chapter would end with a cliff hanger that wasn't mentioned again for another couple of chapters. I am still confused as to the relevance of the monologue of the fugitive immediately after Lottie went missing.

When Lottie did go missing it was increasingly hard to feel any sympathy for her or her mother Alexa. The child was portrayed as the spawn of the devil (all right, I exaggerate! But only slightly!) and the mother was portrayed as someone who hadn't wanted a child and found it very difficult to fit said child in with her high flying job and her own needs.

I found it very annoying when, during the panel shows, the guests were given actors' voices (i.e. not voiced by the narrator) but each time one spoke it was prefaced by their name, as if we wouldn't know who was speaking, but this never happens on radio so I don't think it was necessary at all.

The ending was a total surprise and dealt with very well.

The narrator did a very good job with an excellent delivery and she had a voice that worked very well.