The Collective by Alison Gaylin

​    A shadowy cabal of women dedicated to advancing women causes, that demands unquestioning unwavering loyalty and operates on girlpower basis of small (and not so small) mutual favors.
    Where have I read that before? Oh, yeah, just recently in Catherine McKenzie’s latest, Please Join Us. And now, once again, here in The Collective.
    The comparison isn’t entirely fair, because The Collective came out first, but also impossible to avoid. And sure, in Please Join Us it was all about business and here it’s all about revenge for dead children, but still…it’s there.
      The thing is both are perfectly good thrillers. I’d go as far as to say this is a superior one, because PJU got too businessey toward the end and this stayed pure lean and mean vengeance machine and just continued throwing in one nice plot twist after another.
      It all began with an injustice. Cammie’s only child, a fifteen-year-old daughter went to a party where she was raped and left for dead and the boy responsible for it - a scion of a wealthy local family - got off scot free. This isn’t a sort of thing one just gets past and moves on and so for the last five years Cammie has been stuck in a sort of horrific limbo of anger and powerlessness. And then, she gets invited to an online site that seems catered just for her, the women on it understand her tragedy, share her frustration with the system, and, more importantly, are willing to do something about it. They don’t merely empower Cammie, they give her a chance to get even.
      And it all goes so swimmingly…until it doesn’t. Because girlpower or not, everyone has their own agenda, and you don’t have to know what it is to play right along into it. And once Cammie’s quest for revenge is sated, she begins to understand the grand design behind the network, she even begins tugging at the curtain to reveal the wizard behind it.
     So, there you have it, A real fun psychological thriller with some first-rate writing, especially character writing. This one had my attention engaged through and through, despite the admittedly unfair and frustratingly unavoidable comparisons to PJU. This is the original one out of the two, but it does seem to be written well along the themes of the day, especially with these sorts of thrillers. You got your secretive online networks, women protagonists, women antagonists, women, women, women usually going up against men, only to find out that women can be sinister and manipulative too. Imagine someone writing a book in this day and age about men taking revenge on women - the uproar would be…well, uproarious.
      But anyway, gender politics aside, this was fun. I enjoyed it. Certainly, served as a good introduction to a new author, one I’d definitely read more of. Recommended.