Amy Myers is known for her short stories and historical novels featuring Victorian chef Auguste Didier and chimney sweep Tom Wasp. Her contemporary series feature ex-cop Peter Marsh and Daughter and classic car detective Jack Colby, and she is currently working on a new series starring Cara Shelley who runs a café in the grounds of stately home Tanton Towers.
Website: www.amymyers.net
When We Fall is the new crime novel by this award-winning Australian crime writer Aoife Clifford, known for her earlier well received All These Perfect Strangers and Second Sight.
A first-class story-teller, in this new novel the author sets out to reveal the secrets of the small coastal town of Merritt. In Merritt it’s not strangers from afar who have to be feared but those closer to home. Much closer. It seems to barrister Alex Tillerson that she is battling in vain against the whole world when the novel opens. She is going through a divorce, her career is heading nowhere, and she is currently having to walk on the beach with her mother Denny with whom she has always been at odds. Alex has had to return to living at home in Merritt to care and cope with Denny who has dementia.
Tension simmers on their walk. Despite the beauty of the beach and coastline stretching out to the old lighthouse further along the coast, Alex senses something amiss. Then her mother calls her over to look at something she’s found. Alex does so and is chilled to discover that it’s a woman’s severed leg bone. Was she the victim of a shark? Or was she merely one more victim of the stormy seas? It looks like an accident – and no one is more eager to prove that than Senior Sergeant Kelly of Merritt Police Station.
Alex believes differently and is determined to prove that it is murder. There was for instance a weird tattoo of a black feather on the bone. Was that significant? It might be and so just proving murder isn’t the end of the story for Alex. What was the reason for the murder? Merritt keeps its secrets to itself, but it is public knowledge that this wouldn’t be the first murder to hit the town. What follows is a complex trail as Alex steadfastly uncovers the secrets that had lain buried so long, a trail that leads her into the past of the dead woman and plunges her deep into the past secrets of family and friends. As the intricate plot unwinds it takes her back into the past, shining a light into its darkness.
When We Fall is beguilingly readable and its twists are subtle so that what might appear to be its direction of travel can turn an unexpected corner. A most interesting novel.
