Pages: 400
Published: 9th August 2018
Genre: Domestic Thriller
Content warnings: Child abuse, references to sexual abuse
Following a traumatic event in London, Kirsty Woodhouse packs up her family and moves back to her native Wales. There she sets up her new home with her husband and two young daughters, and goes into business with her difficult mother managing a guesthouse in the Brecon Beacons.
But when the guesthouse is ready to be occupied, Kirsty encounters the last person she ever expected to see: her estranged cousin Selena. It has been seventeen years since they last talked–when Selena tore everything apart between them.
Why has she chosen now to walk back into Kirsty’s life? Is Selena running from something too? Or is there an even darker reason for her visit?
As Kirsty becomes increasingly concerned for the safety of her daughters, her dream home begins to feel like her worst nightmare.
Kirsty knows that once you invite trouble into your home, it can be murder getting rid of it…
This was a perfectly adequate thriller, but also one that will not linger forever in the memory. With a strong setting and the foundations of a decent concept, it uses unreliable characters to try to heighten the sense of mystery and suspense, although it struggles to go beyond its admittedly limited potential as an underwhelming plot and predictable twists ensure that it rarely comes alive.
The overriding feeling is that author plays it much too safe with this book, to the point where you just view it with indifference. There is nothing in particular that truly stands out as really compelling – everything is just okay in an inoffensive yet unsatisfactory way as it leaves you wanting more, and Claire Douglas has shown in some of her other work that she is capable of providing that.
Everything takes place over the course of one timeline, but a lot of the action here relates to past events. There is plenty of water under the bridge where Kirsty and Selena are concerned, which creates a little tension, along with Dean’s appearance and the fact that Selena is very economical with the truth, so there is an interesting set of character dynamics to explore.
The death that this story hinges on takes place just before the halfway point and the identity of the victim perhaps comes as a surprise. It leads to a murder mystery where some of Kirsty’s family and the residents of the guesthouse become suspects, and there are some obvious ones who you think could have been involved somewhere along the line. However, the real answer for who was responsible is quite easy to work out, as it was clearly signposted early on.
That made it something of an anti-climax, though the journey that takes you there is actually not bad at all. It is intriguing to see what some of the characters are hiding, especially the more complex ones such as Adrian and Julia. Both of them keep their cards close to their chest and are hard to fully grasp, with many allusions made to Adrian’s mental health issues.
In contrast, Nathan is much more of an open book and comes across as rather immature, while your heart just has to break for Amelia with all the burdens she carries, suffering in silence. Dean is presented as this devious person with an unfriendly motive to go with his shifty exterior, but there is an element of cliché about him and he is there for no reason other than to act as a red herring.
The people who stayed at the guest house had some personality, but sadly the same cannot be said about Kirsty. For the narrator of the story, she is incredibly dull. Everything about her is just plain vanilla; she is sensible and has a steady moral compass, but besides that she exhibits no individual characteristics whatsoever. Even when she is arguing with her mother, there is nothing for us as readers to latch on to.
A guest house is not the most original of settings, but here it is one of the most impressive aspects of the book. A lot of thought went into the layout and the naming of the rooms after flowers is a nice touch. There is also the location of Monmouthshire, a really beautiful part of the world that is captured well, even with the exaggerated hostility of the locals towards Kirsty when she moves back to the area.
The best thing to be said about the writing is that it is engaging and always easy to follow, with a relatively good sense of pacing. It makes you keep reading, even when the plot is lacking any real spark to it. When we consider that this is a mystery, we are just missing something genuinely surprising – even in the more arresting storyline about Ruby, the truth is easy to spot from a mile away.
Overall, this is the archetypal three star read. It is not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it also contains very little to elevate it beyond that and as a reader, you just want and expect more. A good setting and some untrustworthy suspects aside, there is enough to stay invested through to the end but not much else to look back on with any great fervour.
I have already said what my rating will be! But anyway, I had wanted to read something else by Claire Douglas for some time after enjoying Last Seen Alive in 2018, but I felt that here she wrote within herself and the end result was underwhelming.
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Stephen Reads Books 