Years ago, Fortune gave up on his daughter, Sophie, after a troubled adolescence. Now she’s gone missing, vanished without trace. And after weeks of investigation, the police have given up on her, too.

Driven by guilt, and a determination to atone for his failures as a father, he takes on the search himself. He soon finds that his daughter had been living in fear of a vicious online troll who seemed to know far too much about her. Could Sophie’s disappearance be linked to this unknown predator? Fortune is about to discover that monsters which live online don’t always stay there…

Troll tells a cautionary tale of a young woman, Sophie, who has disappeared without trace. Knowing her troubled background, the police think she has taken her own life, and believing so, have made the decision to step down their investigation and use their resources elsewhere.
 
Fortune, Sophie’s practically estranged father comes home from working in the Middle East to try and find out what has happened to her. He feels like he has let her down badly by not being the best father in the world, and especially for not being there when she needed him, and so it becomes his raison d’etre to find out what happened to his daughter.

In starting his own investigation he begins to find out a whole lot of disturbing things – his daughter kept an online blog and had a little following, including a particularly aggressive commenter who knows a little too much about her, and appears to wish harm upon her.  Digging deeper, Fortune finds strange connections to himself which drive him on, the reasons becoming clearer towards the end of the novel. The theme of things not being quite how you see them to be also grows towards the end of the book.
 
Troll is actually quite slow to begin with and took me a while to get into it, but I’m glad I persevered. It’s creepy and has some really interesting dynamics between the main characters and although it seems like a contradiction, Fortune himself is a complex, yet very ‘normal’ character.
 
I really enjoyed this book once it got going, it keeps building the tension nicely and has a satisfying ending.

4 stars