I can see this psychological drama unfolding on the big screen!

The Crooked House

Christobel Kent

Sphere

Little,Brown

Hachette UK

ISBN: 9780751556971

Description:

Alison is as close to anonymous as she can get: with no ties, no home, a backroom job, hers is a life lived under the radar. She’s a nobody; she has no-one and that’s how she wants it.

But once Alison was someone else: once she was Esme Grace, a teenager whose bedroom sat at the top of a remote and dilapidated house on the edge of a bleak estuary. A girl whose family, if not happy, exactly, was no unhappier than anyone else’s – or so she thought.

Then one night a terrible thing happened in the crooked house, a nightmare of violence out of which Alison emerged the only witness and sole survivor and from which she has been running ever since. Only when she meets academic Paul Bartlett does Alison realise that if she’s to have any chance of happiness, she has to return to her old life and confront the darkness that worked its way inside her family and has pursued her ever since.

My View:

This is a great read – atmospheric, moody, and loaded with tension and anticipation of events to come or to be revealed. The setting is perfect – isolated, remote, rural…a village where life is suffocating and the locals take care things their way –they are judge and jury and don’t take very well to “outsiders “ or police. You can almost hear the Duelling Banjo theme being played in the background – very creepy.

In this narrative you are never quite sure what is truth, what is fiction. The conclusion will astound you, you will not have expected this twist. This read is perfectly sinister. This narrative is made for the big screen.