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.
Known to the locals as simply ‘the house’ Coram House looms over a small town in Vermont like an unpleasant memory. The painful secrets it holds reach into every part of the community, some members of which would go to any length to see them kept.
Amongst the darkest of these secrets is the death by drowning of a boy in the lake near to the house. An event that would eventually bring to light a catalog of abuses enacted by the nuns who ran Coram House as an orphanage.
Years after the event Alex Kelly, a true crime writer with her career and personal life in tatters, is hired to write a book telling the truth about Coram House. What she uncovers is a crime of shocking savagery, for which someone will stop at nothing to get their revenge.
This is a brilliantly atmospheric first novel that taps into the all too real world concerns about what went on behind the closed gates of, so-called, charitable institutions. Seybolt makes skilful use of the great frozen void of a Vermont winter to suggest the charged silence that surrounds cases of historic abuse.
She manages to spring a surprise ending based on all too believable motivations that dovetails neatly with the suspense that has built previously and the sacrifice of justice to protect reputations.
Bailey Seybolt is a writer to watch for anyone who likes their thrillers to be grimly contemporary and rooted in an understanding of the darker areas of human nature.
