This book was amzing. So gripping got an thinking all the way though the book. I had to force myself to put it down. It just shows you can't trust anyone not even the ones closest to you. Well worth the read its a 5* all the way. One the best books I read this year

This a book with lots if twists and right up to the very end I still had no idea who it was! Its such a good plot line and the ending is fab! I sympathised with all the characters throughout and couldn't put this down. It's a real fast paced read, couldn't recommend enough!!

Mommy-blogger Scarlett Salloway has it all, a loving husband, a successful career, a beautiful home, and a new baby whom she adores. With a life like this, what could go wrong? Plenty. When someone posts something from her past for all of the world to see, her life comes crashing down around her, and just when it seems that it can't get any worse, Scarlett knows that it can...because she has another, more terrible secret that she would do almost anything to keep hidden.

The mystery of who did this to Scarlett keeps the reader turning the pages late into the night. I could not put this book down. Set in England, I loved Caroline Corcoran's writing style and her characters. I would recommend this book to mystery-lovers everywhere.

Thanks to Net Galley, Caroline Corcoran, and Avon Publishers for allowing me to read an advanced copy of this book.

I have mixed feelings about this. Whilst I enjoyed the suspense and the twists, I felt frustrated by the characters and their judgements for Scarlett"s mistakes when she was younger. I understand the embarrassment factor is huge, but the prejudice annoyed me.
It was a little slow in the middle but the ending was good.

Scarlett seemingly has the picture perfect life but once you dig a little deeper you uncover a troubled past which has been hidden. Scarlett’s life is rocked when a tape from her past is uncovered and the race is on to find the culprit. I very much enjoyed this book and the twists - at every Anon passage I was trying to look for hints and clues as to who it could have been. Brilliantly written by Corcoran and would definitely recommend for other fans of mystery novels. I will be keeping my eye out for books of hers in future! Thank you Avon for the ARC and opportunity to read The Baby Group.

Really good read. Would recommend to friends and family. I could sympathise with characters (important for any fiction novel!) and looked forward to picking it up and reading the next few chapters! Interesting plot line and a good ending. Will look out for more novels by the author. Thank you.

The was a pretty solid suspense novel. I did think it drug on a little bit at times. I felt like the same things were being repeated but it didn’t move into drudgery or make it hard to get through. I did figure out who the culprit was so it wasn’t a surprise which is why I gave it 3 stars. There is a bit of a twist at the end which wasn’t obvious to me. It was an enjoyable read overall.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

Thank you so much to net galley for sending me a copy of this book. I was so excited going into it and I was not disappointed.

This is a story about motherhood, lies and betrayal. You never really know who you can trust is my feelings when reading this book. The main character is Scarlett after having a baby, she like many mums meets up with the other mums from the baby group. Scarlett has a past and unfortunately it decides to rear its ugly head in a very dramatic and life changing way for her, but who is behind it?and will Scarlett's life every be the same again? There are twists and turns, and it had me gripped, I had my suspicions, but I was wrong. Another good read from Caroline and I look forward to the next book.

A pacy read, I think when you get a group of characters like this, you're always in for a bit of a ride. Loved the twists and turns. A great book for anybody looking for a story they can't put down

Wow. Great novel. Kept me hooked from the first page right through to the last. Great character development throughout

As the title suggests this book revolves around the relatively new friendships made with new Mums. However, all is not as it seems when Scarlett discovers that a video of her when she was younger has been posted online and sent to all her family, friends and work colleagues with devastating consequences.
I found the book rather slow to start off with but it picked up pace halfway through the book and I enjoyed the twists, turns and deceptions and the ending which I didn't see coming.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Wow! I've never read anything by Caroline Corcoran but I'm definitely going to purchase more of her novels. This was an excellent read. Didn't take me long to finish it at all. I could not put this book down. It was a compelling and chilling read. It really makes you question who you can actually trust.
I received an advanced readers copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

A tense thriller kept me reading late into the night.An author whose books I will be devouring.Will be recommending to all multilayered thriller lovers,#netgalley#avonbooks Uk

SPOILER-FREE REVIEW: The Baby Group, by Caroline Corcoran, is set to be released by Avon Books UK on September 17, 2020, but I couldn’t find a preorder date or release date on Amazon or B&N for the United States at this time. The book is a mystery/thriller novel about a woman named Scarlett whose world crashes in around her as she prepares to return to work after maternity leave...because someone in her baby group, whom she considers a close friend, is ready to watch Scarlett's life go down in flames.

PLOT RUNDOWN/BASICS: Scarlett is a 35-year-old wife and mother, living with her husband Ed in the (very) small town of Cheshire, England. For the past year, her life has been centered on her maternity leave with her daughter, Poppy, who is just shy of her first birthday when we first meet Scarlett. Finances are becoming tight after spending twelve months at home with her child, and she's reluctantly ready to leave her days of baby classes and coffee meet-ups with her four baby-group friends to re-enter the business world. She's worked on becoming a successful Instagram blogger and has 7500 followers, but while she receives free baby equipment and swag for running Chesire Mama, she's yet to turn it into a money-making venture. In her previous pre-mom life, Scarlett was a star in the world of marketing and social media at her job in Manchester...and while she's filled with dread at the thought of leaving her daughter with a stranger during the day, she feels the tiniest bit of excitement at the thought of spending her days conversing with other adults and making her own food choices. Her husband, a successful accountant for a large firm, is also stoically pushing Scarlett to rejoin the workforce and take some of the financial pressure off...which she finds frustrating, considering his seeming lack of interest in sharing the parental responsibilities at home, even as they enter a dual-working partnership.

Scarlett's former friends and coworkers have seemingly fallen by the wayside in recent months, and she's becoming exceedingly close to three women she met in her antenatal classes during the last months of her pregnancy - Cora, Emma, and Asha. They created phone trees, group texts, and eventually playdates...and having 3 babies the same age has led them to spending multiple weekdays together doing mom-and-me activities and taking some of the pressures off of motherhood. They order each other coffee drinks, hold babies for bathroom breaks, and even feed each other when they're breastfeeding. Scarlett realizes that she's honestly sad about losing her regular playdates with her new friends, but she assumes that they've gotten so close that they'll remain good friends even as she tries to resume a normal working schedule in Manchester, with a 30-minute commute.

But Scarlett's entry back into the workforce begins with a bang that blows up her entire life. Her blog shows her perfectly curated life at home with Ed and Poppy, and her gatherings with her mom friends and their children...but before she was married and "properly posh" Scarlett, she was "wild-and-free" Scarlett. Someone who partied all night, drank and did drugs during the day, and who once - in a fit of grief and rebellion after losing a pregnancy - agreed to a filmed three-way with her boyfriend and a male friend. And that film was not destroyed, nor did it disappear. And now, as Scarlett discovers while re-entering the halls and offices of her employer, it's been resurrected...and sent to literally every person she knows. All of her coworkers, her father, her husband, her in-laws...everyone, it seems, except her new mom friends.

Scarlett works hard to maintain the facade for her mom friends, keeping mum about the tape...but the rest of her world falls in around her. Her husband, who has always been uptight and private, becomes disappointed and distant. Together they hire a lawyer, who tells them that they can eventually remove the video from online...but that first, she should work to gather concrete evidence and figure out who has motive to destroy her life by posting it in the first place. But just as Scarlett begins her investigation, we as readers learn - through chapters written by someone titled "anonymous" - that the threat to her marriage, her job, and her role as a dedicated mother is much closer to home than she could have imagined. Because one of the three women in her baby group is the person who is actively trying to destroy her life...and she'll go to ANY lengths to keep her from finding a way to pick up the pieces, including revealing even more damning secrets that Scarlett is desperate to keep hidden from her past.

MY THOUGHTS: This was my first book by Corcoran, but I will pick up and read almost any British thriller I can get my hands on. The version of the book that I read was the British release, and it took me a good 30-50 pages (and the occasional use of Google) to get used to all of the non-Americanized slang like "WAGs" and "Noughties music" and all of the British pop-culture references. (And as someone who has read so many British novels that I regularly think of elevators as lifts, parking lots as car parks, and "bloody hell" as a great curse...I was stunned at how much work apparently goes into translating a British novel for us across-the-pond readers.)

Corcoran writes in a very stream-of-consciousness way, where it seems as if we're literally hearing every single thought that goes through Scarlett's head as she lives through the experiences in the novel. If you're used to a thriller novel that has more mystery and an unpredictable narrator (think "The Girl on the Train," "The Woman in the Window," or just generally Ruth Ware), this can be disconcerting or hard to get used to...but I was able to appreciate the raw honesty and emotion that this evoked after Scarlett's life starts to fall apart. She spirals through grief, shame, and a desperation to find out who is doing this to her and why...and in the process, reveals many raw truths about the difficulties in being a wife and mother right now. In regards to leaving her daughter with a child-minder during the day, she says, “I’ve overdone it. Even I know it. But if you pack enough bags, the feelings of guilt can perhaps be squashed under their weight. If you buy enough stuff, perhaps what you can’t purchase - time with your daughter, sanity, a mind that isn’t running away with thoughts about the right time to get out Doggy Dog - isn’t as obvious.”

Scarlett’s journey in this book becomes as much a voyage of self-discovery as it does an earnest desire to find out who is trying to ruin her life and marriage. She begins to realize that she doesn’t know her friends from the baby group as much as she thought she did - “We might not have each other’s job titles down, but we know each other’s judgments,” she says. And these judgments among women - the harshest critics, it seems, of other women - seem to be the impetus for what is happening to Scarlett. Her former boss sends her a text to tell her that no one is judging her at the office, and her response? “And I laugh. Because everyone is judging me every day, everyone is judging everyone every day. What they’re posting, what they’re wearing, what they’re ordering, where they’re going. What their job is, who they’re married to, what car they drive, what make their bag is. Sling a sex tape into the mix though and you up the stakes.”

Those snap judgments often lead to fractures in relationships, especially when combined with a heavy dose of anxiety, likely mental illness, and our imperfectly incorrect impressions of other people. Throw these things together in a fiction novel, and you get an unsuspecting victim of an explosive powder keg of rage, which is what happens to Scarlett. She is betrayed by people she believed were her friends, and she has to learn when to stand up for her marriage, her choices, and her friends...and when to let go. By the end of the book, she’s undergone an intense and dark personal transformation...but there is a ray of hope that, just maybe, she walks away in a better situation than you would have imagined existed in the deepest dregs of the story.

To be completely honest, I was doubtful at first that I would like this book; the language and style of writing was a bit much for my liking at first, but I was really won over by the time that Scarlett headed in for her fateful first day back at work. I found myself nodding along with Scarlett’s brutal and honest observations about marriage, relationships, and motherhood, and about what it’s like trying to be honest with the world (especially on social media) about who you are without seeming TOO happy and successful (smug), or TOO depressed and unlucky (ungrateful): “What a precarious balance it is, I think, of being happy in public but not too happy. Celebrating your wins but not being smug. Making it clear that you’ve had your allocated amount of shit times without spending your life moaning. I am drained, thinking about it.” Scarlett’s experience in The Baby Group is an extreme version of what happens when you spend more time worrying about keeping up that delicate balance than you do learning about the people you allow into your life.

Wow!! What a book - totally absorbing, thrilling and heart stopping. Caroline Corcoran manages to convey all the emotions the protagonist is feeling - at times I was holding my breath. A brilliant psychological thriller that I will be recommending to all my friends.

Simply a great book!!
I loved this - easy to read, well written, great characters, believable, and I would thoroughly recommend you read this.

I have now bought the Authors first book as I enjoyed this so much.

Well written story. Kept me engaged the entire time. A page turner for sure! Looking forward to reading more books by this author!

The Baby Group is about Scarlett, an mummy blogger whose embarrassing secret from the past is revealed and turns her life around. She navigates her marriage and baby group trying to discover who did it, and why.

This was my first "mummy" novel (if there is such a genre) and I didn't mind it at all. The book is told from the point of view of various characters, and each chapter takes you closer to the truth.... which is totally not what you were expecting! The twist is really good and the ending is satisfying, although bittersweet.

Definitely looking forward to Caroline's next novel.

Disclosure: I'd like to thank Netgalley and the publisher for my advanced reader copy. This is my honest review.

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I really enjoyed ‘The Baby Group’ having been drawn in by the promise of a plot based around the unique friendship that comes with the meeting of women bonded by a shared entry to motherhood.

Where this NCT group takes a departure from the norm is that this one involves a sex tape! We quickly learn of Scarlett experiencing the ultimate mortification - having a sex tape, which had long since been relegated to her youth, anonymously emailed to her work colleagues, friends and relatives!

Told through the dual narrative of Scarlett and ‘Anon’ we are quickly led to believe that one of Scarlett’s mum friends bears a serious grudge against her! But who and why?!

The plot was gripping, the relationships between characters felt real, relatable and authentic. This was the sort of book that was easy to get into, and once it had your attention it had no problem keeping it!

My thanks to Netgalley, author and publisher for the opportunity to review this book in exchange for an honest review.