Originally published: 11 July 2019

Author: Louise Voss

Published by: Orenda Books

Genre: Thriller

Length: 306 pages

Reading dates: 5-8 July 2019

Meredith Vincent, once a world famous singer in rock band Cohen, is living the quiet life in obscurity, working in a gift shop in a stately home.  She lives in a cottage on the estate, she has only a couple of close friends and no-one apart from her twin brother Pete knows about her previous life.

We quickly find out that something happened to Meredith that caused her to disappear from the public eye, something terrifying which still haunts her to this day.  One day when she turns up at the shop she finds it has been vandalised. She also has her garden damaged.  And then, when a body of a friend of Meredith’s turns up in a pond on the estate, she realises that someone is watching her and has returned to finish what they started over 20 years before…

This was a great thriller!  There were a lot of threads to this story – I was desperate to find out what had happened to Meredith (who for some reason I pictured as Kim Wilde in my head!)  and Voss did a good job of teasing out the threads of the story at just the right pace.  As well as the present day, we return to the early 1980s, where we meet the teenage Meredith, rebelling against the establishment and her parents, falling in love with a woman and leaving home after her dad died to live in a squat in London, before joining a band and hitting the big time.

I really enjoyed the writing and it kept me highly entertained which is just what you want in a thriller!  I always think the sign of a good book is that I start looking forward to my lunch break at work so I can read some more!  The threat in the book felt very real and Voss does a good job of ramping up the levels of anxiety I felt.  I loved the relationship between Meredith and Pete – after several years of estrangement, the love they feel for each other is touching.  The setting of a country house and a pretty little village made it even more atmospheric.

A real page turner of a thriller, the pace and storytelling made this a fast read, which I really enjoyed!

Many thanks to Karen at Orenda for sending me an advanced copy and to Anne Cater for inviting me on the blog tour.  Be sure to checkout the other stops below…

About the author:

Over her eighteen-year writing career, Louise Voss has had eleven novels published – five solo and six co-written with Mark Edwards: a combination of psychological thrillers, police procedurals and contemporary fiction – and sold over 350,000 books. Her most recent book, The Old You, was a number one bestseller in eBook. Louise has an MA (Dist) in Creative Writing and also works as a literary consultant and mentor for writers at http://www.thewritingcoach.co.uk. She lives in South-West London and is a proud member of two female crimewriting collectives, The Slice Girls and Killer Women.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LouiseVoss1