Book Review: The Bones of You

The Bones of You
The Bones of You by Debbie Howells
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This brilliant début novel by UK author Debbie Howells gripped me from the beginning. It’s a psychological thriller that examines, in depth, the dark side that lurks in idyllic villages behind the everyday façade of normality. It’s all about people who live in nice houses in good neighbourhoods and have seemingly perfect jobs, marriages, children, etc.

Rosie Anderson, aged 18, vanishes and is found dead in the woods. Her mother and father are distraught. Their marriage fits into the perfect bracket. She’s a wife who keeps describing her husband as “an amazing man” — once too often.

Kate is a friend of the family and, as the story progresses, she turns amateur sleuth bent on solving the mystery of Rosie’s murder. She also becomes Rosie’s mother’s main confidante and prop.

The story is told mostly from Kate’s viewpoint. Then secondly from the viewpoint of Rosie, telling from beyond the grave the story of her less than happy life with her parents, so that slowly we see the unraveling of what on the surface seemed perfection.

This novel is excellently crafted and deeply disturbing, with its characters drawn in fine detail.

A highly recommended read.

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Review: In a Dark, Dark Wood

In a Dark, Dark Wood
In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This thriller is about a hen party from hell, with a tight cast of people carrying a heap of emotional baggage from the past. Not only do they have axes to grind with one another, but at least one of them is seriously unhinged.

The setting for the novel, as the title suggests, is in a dark, dark wood that’s off the beaten track. There’s no mobile signal, of course. The owner of the property is absent. The house is modern with lots of huge picture-windows without curtains or blinds, meaning that at night anyone can see in, but nobody can see out. Stephen King would be proud of the author!

When reading this book, I admit to being spooked and holding my breath on numerous occasions, if not letting out the occasional shriek of surprise. So yes, the novel succeeded on many fronts but didn’t quite make the 5-star slot, as I disliked the characters immensely and wanted to bang their heads together. This isn’t the first book I’ve read where people have burned their guts with lethal alcoholic cocktails and sniffed coke, it was more that this particular cast were so pretentious and self-absorbed, that is was difficult to feel any sympathy for them.

Of course, bearing in my disdain for the characters, I still felt compelled to read on because the novel is exceedingly well-written. It’s pacy, punchy, spooky, freaky, alarming, and has a satisfactory conclusion.

This is British author Ruth Ware’s début novel and I will definitely want to read her next one when it comes out.

In summary, if you want to read a novel that’s a page-turner and will keep you awake at night, then this is for you.

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That Eureka Moment re Book Blurb -v- Physical Assault by Blueberries

A big thank you to everybody who responded to my cry of despair earlier this week in The Nightmare of Writing Your Own Amazon Book Description. You all gave me some excellent feedback, which resulted in me deciding to start from scratch. Although Version 4 was the clear favourite, it still had its flaws, the main one being that it focused more on a secondary character than my main protagonist.

So here is what I’ve come up with…

Perched on the clifftops at Helmstone-by-sea, British boarding school Toffdene exists in splendid isolation, pretending the Swinging Sixties aren’t happening outside its walls.

Janet is a science scholarship girl who believes that all paranormal phenomena have a rational explanation, until she meets a hippie pixie who lives in a dimensional transcendental toadstool.

Something stirs in the dark of the old tunnel leading from the playing fields down to the beach. Soon the teachers and pupils develop a hive mind determined to ensnare Janet in its collective consciousness. The hippie pixie might have cured Janet’s acne with a single kiss, but his claim that he can fix what’s wrong with everyone else by mending an interdimensional rift is quite another matter.

I did have a struggle over deciding whether “Swinging Sixties” is/are singular or plural in the context above. When I threw it open to discussion in a writing group I belong to on Facebook, the majority of people said it was plural. Mister is insistent that it’s singular. Two online grammar-checkers said it was okay with either and one other threw out the singular version.

Blueberries

As for those blueberries, all I can say is one person’s superfruit is another person’s  poison. There was me thinking that book marketing (especially the part about describing my product) was causing me such stress that it was giving me severe palpitations bad enough for me to think my end was nigh. The only time in the day my heart was desisting from gymnastics was first thing in the morning. But half-an-hour after my supposedly healthy breakfast, which included a handful of blueberries, my heart would go haywire. Then I remembered that my pulse had been perfectly even, at around 63 beats per minute, prior to inclusion of the little blue blighters in my morning fruit salad, so I stopped having them and, hey presto, no more palpitations.

Now I’m feeling calm, I’ve decided to run an Amazon giveaway for the next seven days now ended, where one person gets to win has won a paperback copy of Desiccation. Entrants just have to choose a number and hope that it’s the preset winning number that I’ve chosen. Unfortunately, at the moment giveaways are only happening on amazon.com, which means they’re only open to US citizens, so sorry to disappoint my fellow citizens in the UK.

Here’s wishing you all a wonderful week, and watch out for those rampaging blueberries 😉