Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
There are facts and then there is the ‘truth’, this neat distinction has shaped Lucy Harper’s life since her brother disappeared when she was nine.
Thirty years on she has a husband and a career as a bestselling thriller writer. She also is increasingly concerned that he is keeping secrets from her — when he too goes missing it seems like Lucy’s past and the world she has created in her books, is about to collide with reality.
This dark and suspenseful novel works magnificently on more than one level. It is a skillfully constructed thriller that keeps its readers guessing. Is Lucy being gaslit by her husband, or the character who has made her famous? Gilly MacMillan has a neat take on how relationships change, and sometimes fracture, as youthful dreams either harden into a career or slip out of sight.
The setting is a brilliantly captured upscale suburbia with all the rivalries and resentments that hide behind tall gates and tidy hedges. She mixes this with the more elemental presence of the natural world; with all the half-seen things that might hide there, conjured up by memory or maybe something darker.
Throughout Lucy’s voice comes over as that of a woman driven to the edge of collapse by trying to explain the unraveling of her life, whilst hiding vital evidence from herself.
Gilly Macmillan is a writer at the top of her game, finding the stuff of nightmares in the calm of suburbia and playing the tense to breaking point nerves of her central character like a virtuoso does those of a violin.
