Copycat: The unputdownable new thriller from the bestselling author of After Anna
The gripping new psychological thriller from the bestselling author of After Anna and Killing Kate.Imitation is the most terrifying form of flattery…Which Sarah Havenant is you?When an old friend gets in touch, Sarah Havenant discovers that there are two Facebook profiles in her name. One is hers. The other, she has never seen.But everything in it is accurate. Photos of her friends, her husband, her kids. Photos from the day before. Photos of her new kitchen. Photos taken inside her house.And this is just the beginning. Because whoever has set up the second profile has been waiting for Sarah to find it. And now that she has, her life will no longer be her own…
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COPYCAT
Alex Lake
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Copyright © Alex Lake 2017
Cover design Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Cover photograph © Stephen Carroll/Trevillion Images
Alex Lake asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008199746
Ebook Edition © September 2017 ISBN: 9780008199753
Version: 2018-10-24
To Mum and Dad, who taught me the magic words: ‘Of course you can’.
Table of Contents
The first time someone said that Karen was gone for good was during the week after she disappeared. People – mothers – didn’t just leave their kids without warning for days on end, unless there was something wrong. Very wrong. Depressed, maybe, after the birth of her second child. Or unhappy in her relationship. Her boyfriend was not a local, and he was a few years older than her. Who knew what went on behind the closed doors of their house?
Not Sarah Havenant, or any of her friends, although they were the last to see her. It was the day Sarah moved back to Barrow, Maine, after four years of college and then four more of medical school, ready to start her residency at the local hospital, and she and her friends had gotten together in a bar. Reconnect. Catch up on old times. Talk about what was to come.
Sarah, Jean, Franny, Luke. The old gang, at least the ones who were still around.
And Karen. Karen, mom of two boys, a three-year-old and a one-year-old. Karen, who was now missing.
Sarah didn’t remember Karen leaving the bar. It was sometime before 2 a.m., which was the time she had staggered into a cab with Franny and Luke. Alec – a guy they had bumped into – had offered to drive but, drunk as she was, Sarah had been sensible enough to turn hiskind offer down.
Franny and Luke didn’t remember seeing her leave either, and neither did Jean, who had left early; she worked on an organic farm in the summers and had to get ready for the farmers’ market the following day.
But sometime in between Jean’s early departure and 2 a.m., Karen had left too.
Although, as it turned out, vanished was a better word.
The next day, Sarah had run into Karen’s boyfriend, and father of her two sons. She didn’t know him – they’d met briefly once or twice when she was back in town – and he’d asked if she knew where Karen was.
Sarah shook her head. Is Karen OK? she said.
She didn’t come home last night, he replied. I woke up around four with this guy – he was with his sons and he kissed the one-year-old on the top of the head – and she wasn’t there. I called her cell but there was no answer.
He’d called around. Tried the local hospital. But there was no trace of her.
At some point in the night, impossible though it seemed, she had disappeared.
And, with nearly a week gone, it looked like she wasn’t planning on coming back anytime soon.
Sarah Havenant glanced at her phone as she walked to Examining Room Three. She was expecting a message from Ben, her husband, telling her whether he could pick up their son, Miles – a mere seven years old but, all of a sudden, every bit the rebellious teenager, which was a surprising and unwelcome transformation – from the farm camp where he was spending a week of his summer vacation. If not it meant she would have to leave the Barrow Medical Center as soon as she finished work and head over there to get him, which would mean no stop at the gym on the way home and no workout.
