#BlogTour ‘Reputation’ by Sarah Vaughan

About the book…

As a politician, Emma has sacrificed a great deal for her career—including her marriage and her relationship with her daughter, Flora.

A former teacher, the glare of the spotlight is unnerving for Emma, particularly when it leads to countless insults, threats, and trolling as she tries to work in the public eye. As a woman, she knows her reputation is worth its weight in gold but as a politician, she discovers it only takes one slip-up to destroy it completely.

Fourteen-year-old Flora is learning the same hard lessons at school as she encounters heartless bullying. When another teenager takes her own life, Emma lobbies for a new law to protect women and girls from the effects of online abuse. Now, Emma and Flora find their personal lives uncomfortably intersected…but then the unthinkable happens.

A man is found dead in Emma’s home. A man she had every reason to be afraid of and to want gone. Fighting to protect her reputation, and determined to protect her family at all costs, Emma is pushed to the limits as the worst happens and her life is torn apart.

Another breathless and twisty novel from an absolute “master of suspense” (CrimeReads), Reputation brilliantly illustrates that it isn’t who you are that matters…it’s who people think you are.

Hugest of thanks to the wonderful Anne Cater of Random Things Tours and publishers Simon Schuster UK for the blog tour invite and gifted review ‘Reputation’ by Sarah Vaughan

A brilliant and timely novel on the way the voice of a woman in the public sphere is distorted through the lens of societal mores, this novel spoke to me on so many levels. As a woman in her 40’s, it is too easy to understand exactly why Emma Webster decided to go with the magazine cover that really thrust her into the spotlight-she was seduced into feeling like a sexual being again, something she had not been since the dissolution of her marriage to Flora’s father, David.

Her feeling of invisibility as she orbits the hinterland between maiden and crone, is instantly relatable. She wants to use her unexpectedly premature promotion to local MP,-predicated on wanting to be able to create visible, tangible change-to elevate the voice of the underdog, whether they are home grown or foreign. Tackling the issue of revenge porn and demanding tougher sentencing for the lives which are, in many cases, irreparably ruined, she is making a stand for women’s rights, and causing no end of backlash in her wake.

So when the novel opens with the death of a man, potentially murdered, and lying unnamed on the floor, you want to know what led up to this point and, more importantly from the tone of the novel’s synopsis, whodunnit and why.

It is the age old story of the hens in the henhouse squawking for help and disturbing the farmer from his sleep, who decides that having put chicken wire around the coop, they should just be quiet and go to sleep. Unfortunately, he has imprisoned the fox in with the chickens, so when he finds blood everywhere in the morning, he blames the chickens for not being louder. And this is the case with the #MeToo movement, apparently women have ‘spoilt’ men’s fun in being able to ogle, harass, intimidate and otherwise persecute the women in their lives. Crimes are meaningless and forgettable as vigils and marches proclaim ‘Never again’. Until it happens again, in even more luridly reported headlines and op eds.

In the midst of this, we have a female MP who is in a position of power, someone who could raise these issues in Parliament. In order to get here, however, she has lost her husband, physically and metaphorically. The David 2.0 is a remodelled version, far fitter and happier than he was with her, therefore here is her failure as a wife. Her daughter, Flora, is being bullied via social media as well as in school, her step-mother, Caroline, is more aware of this than Emma, so there is strike 2, she fails as a parent. Shocking, and yet scarcely predictable scenes in her constituency clinics , when she comes face to face with the face of male vehemence. Her voters feel she has let her down, as she is fighting for women’s rights, against a sea of ‘whatabouttery‘  from the men. She is even, according to men on Twitter, ‘unrapeable‘ (btw, none of this surprises me, you do not have to dig very far at all to see the absolutely appalling language people seem to feel is acceptable to throw out from behind their keyboards on a daily basis. How sad is that?)

As Emma’s life seems an entirely thankless and powerless existence, you stop and wonder is it a pyrrhic victory, her MP-ship? Can effective change ever be more than aspirational?

But as you dig deeper into situations and relationships, you quickly become aware that misogyny on an epic scale means pretty much any ,man in her life could be the corpse. And if so, good riddance.

She is fighting battles on so many fronts that it would be easy to write her off as a victim, but this is a woman who has passion in her blood, and a promise to her father to keep. The MPILF, as she is known by male MPs is absolutely not going to sit down, be quiet and behave. However, in so doing, is she ignoring a woman who needs her, so much closer to home?

A political, social, and psychological thriller which could have been weighed down by its dark subjects, this is an incredibly engaging novel which examines just what you have to sacrifice in order to build a reputation worth fighting for. And, when you look in the reflection of it’s glow, do you even see your true self anymore?

When it is broken, will its shards turn and cut you,

Can it ever be rebuilt?

Who wants to destroy Emma, and why?

Is it what she represents, or her actual self who is a target?

There wasn’t anything I did not like about the way Sarah writes, from several, principally female, perspectives. She creates a highly readable insight into Parliamentary processes, the work of MPs ,and just who you can-or cannot-trust. It deals with subjects which many might feel disturbing, however, whilst she is not unflinching in the depiction of the consequences of certain individuals actions, she is never exploitative in discussing suicide, murder, and revenge porn.

About the author…

Sarah Vaughan read English at Oxford and went on to be a journalist. After training with the Press Association, she worked for The Guardian for 11 years as a news reporter, health correspondent and political correspondent before leaving to freelance and write fiction.

Her 3rd novel, ‘Anatomy Of A Scandal’, was an instant international bestseller, a Sunday Times top five bestseller, a kindle number 1 bestseller, a Richard & Judy pick, and was longlisted for the Theakson’s Old Peculier Crime Novel and shortlisted for awards in France, Sweden and the UK.

It has been translated into 22 languages and is being adapted for TV. Her 4th novel, ‘Little Disasters’, will be published in France, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, the UK on April 2 and the US on August 18. She lives in Cambridge with her husband and two young children.

Links-https://www.sarahvaughanauthor.com/

Twitter @SVaughanAuthor @RandomTTours @simonschusteruk