Unmasking Samantha Cookes

Lies? Yes, everyone lies. I've lied ever since I could remember. It's the only thing I do well, and I think we should all play to our strengths, don't you?'

Unmasking Samantha Cookes is the chilling true story of a master manipulator who spent more than a decade reinventing herself across the UK and Ireland with an arsenal of false identities. Once known to millions as 'Carrie Jade Williams', she slipped seamlessly from au pair and nanny to therapist, psychologist, terminally ill author and online 'sickfluencer'. Each persona carefully crafted. Each lie more audacious than the last. And each one designed to gain trust - and exploit it.

What started with the tragic death of a baby soon became a trail of fraud, deception and shattered lives. Every reinvention brought new victims, until her most audacious lie, a fabricated terminal illness, triggered a TikTok reckoning.

Drawing on exclusive evidence and firsthand accounts, Unmasking Samantha Cookes pulls back the curtain on a mastermind of deception hiding in plain sight, and reveals just how easily trust can be weaponised, with an unsettling question at its core: how well do we really know the people we trust with our children?

Ideal for readers who:

• Are unsettled by true crime built around deception, identity and manipulation.
• Recognise how reinvention can become chillingly calculated.
• Are looking for real lives disrupted across the UK and Ireland brought into focus.
• Expect uncomfortable non-fiction that keeps the human cost visible.

ISBN

9781785375934

Format

Paperback

Publisher

Merrion Press, (21 May 2026)

Number of Pages

224

Language

English

Dimensions

226 x 153 mm

Categories:

Fraud True crime The self ego identity personality