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.
The sudden death of the mother from whom she is estranged brings Caitlin back to the small Irish town she left twenty years earlier following the disappearance of her friend Roisin.
Rosin’s older sister Deedee has stayed in the town and is now a Garda and has spent the intervening years engaged in a private investigation that has become an obsession. Convinced that Caitlin has information she has kept secret for two decades she seizes on her return as a last opportunity to find out what happened.
As the Winter Solstice approaches the Hanging Wood casts its long shadow over two troubled women and a town full of secrets.
Rebecca Hannigan’s debut novel is a chilling and atmospheric thriller that delves deep into painful secrets buried behind the seemly friendly rhythms of small town life. In the process revealing how their presence warps the lives of those who keep the secrets, and those who try to bring them to the surface.
She taps into the darker side of Irish folklore to describe a countryside where the ‘other’ is a sinister presence forever on the edge of life, vastly different from and way more dangerous than the version sold to the tourists celebrating the solstice. The resolution, when it arrives, is linked to an all too believably real crime translated by childhood imaginings and the misperceptions, or unconscious self defence mechanisms, they often contain.
This is an assured debut from a writer with a knack for finding the unsettling in the ordinary and an ability to create characters who are relatable, if not often likable. The pacing is perfect and the setting brilliantly realized, Darkrooms could well be one of the standout novels of the year to come.
