Daisy Darker is an all-consuming tale of psychological suspense with a spectacular twist from the internationally bestselling author Alice Feeney
Daisy Darker’s family were as dark as dark can be, when one of them died all of them lied and pretended not to see . . .
Daisy Darker is arriving at her grandmother’s house for her eightieth birthday. It is Halloween, and Seaglass – the crumbling Cornish house perched upon its own tiny private island – is at one with the granite rocks it sits on. The Darker family haven’t all been in the same place for over a decade, and when the tide comes in they’ll be cut off from the rest of the world for eight hours. When the tide goes back out, nothing will ever be the same again, because one of them is a killer . . .
Ooh, this is a fabulous book! Yet another closed-room murder mystery (there are an awful lot of them around at the moment), but probably the best one that I’ve read for some time. Rather quirky, very much aware of the genre and its predecessors, ‘Daisy Darker’ is a book that is likely to be loved by readers this autumn.
There are plenty of obvious winks to Christie’s ‘And Then There Were None’ in this novel, and I really liked the rather mischievous poems that are scrawled on the blackboard after each murder. It’s a formulaic thriller (one death every hour, each family member highlighted in turn, flashbacks throughout the novel), but this doesn’t take away from its originality – Feeney has simply taken the things that work well in other murder mysteries and woven them into her own narrative. Absolutely nothing wrong with that!
I thought that I knew what was going on in this book, but I couldn’t have been more wrong! There’s a huge twist at the end, and for that reason, I’m going to say very little about plot or character here, expect that this is one dysfunctional family! I really enjoyed this book though, and would urge others to add it to their autumn reading list.
The audiobook is narrated by Stephanie Racine. She’s a fabulous reader and has won awards for voicing another Alice Feeney book, ‘Sometimes I Lie’.
‘Daisy Darker’ will be published on 18th August 2022. Thank you to NetGalley UK, Macmillan UK Audio and Alice Feeney for his ARC in return for my honest review.
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