The Winner
By C.J. Parsons

C.J. Parsons excels in this psychological thriller that will really get inside your head and makes you think about what we think we see, clearer.
Check out the blurb and my full review below, as well as the cover you could simply splash into.

Blurb

Fame, fortune, followers. Be careful what you wish for…

Heather thought she’d been left behind in life, until she won a place in the luxurious ‘Triple F’ lottery, where fame, fortune and followers await 12 lucky winners.

The rules are simple: live the lifestyle of your dreams and win £5,000 a week for the rest of your life, plus six months of fame on the country’s most popular app – as long as you’re not bottom of the rankings. Lose your followers, and you lose everything.

But there’s trouble in paradise.

Too many winners are falling victim to tragedy: addiction, depression, even suicide. Someone, somewhere, seems to know their secrets, and is stirring up hatred online. And Heather has secrets of her own.

Suddenly she’s not worried about losing her lifestyle. She’s afraid of losing her life.

Review

Truly focusing on desires, the projections of what we’re meant to be, it can get to some people. Heather is the main character in this warning tale of wanting more out of life, but it isn’t all it seems.

Imagine winning £5000 per week, having what’s reckoned to be the fancy lifestyle and the fame and followers that comes with it. Sounds amazing, right? Like having life cracked and all will be perfect. That’s what Heather thinks because life hasn’t been great to her, until this once in a lifetime opportunity. She’s going to be a winner!

This is a cleverly written cautionary tale that takes readers to the dark side of such desires and obsessions. The stakes are high and so is the price to pay when it comes to these social media influencers. That’s when it becomes a gripping psychological drama that plays out. Someone plays with the winners minds and knows their secrets. The wins become more damaging to people than they can ever imagine.

Winning is lifechanging, but not in the way that the winners of this lottery imagine it would be in this gripping, page-turning read that draws you in from the start and hard to put down until the end.