Her new life in Wales has not turned out to be the rural fantasy social worker Jess imagined when she moved from London seven months ago. As she starts a new investigation Jess gets the news that a boy has been found dead in woods just a few miles from her house. As her professional life is getting hard to deal with, she is also forced to come to terms with her own past when someone unexpectedly resurfaces and Jess finds herself crossing the line from investigator to suspect and, under pressure from all sides, is forced to question the very basis of her identity.

Mmmm...an okay read but a bit of an odd mix & I feel a bit cheated by the cover comment describing it as a "...stark, contemporary modern gothic with a plot like a nest of seething vipers" (Okay I'll admit that I'm not exactly sure what that means but I don't feel I got it!)

The blurb tells you all you need to know to get the gist of the story & it certainly has potential but it just didn't do it for me. I didn't find the characters credible. Was Jess naive, gullible or just downright stupid?

Somethings seemed to be skipped - left to the readers imagination? - or passed over in a way that it wasn't always obvious if something had...or hadn't...happened - although it could have been the fact that my concentration wasn't all it should have been! To be fair, there are one or two good twists along the way. At one point, a "twist" jumped out & slapped me in the face & yet for all I was right about it, things still took a further turn that I didn't expect. It's a decent enough plot but it could have been so much more. I felt I was constantly waiting for the point where I'd be hooked but it wasn't to be & ultimately I wasn't convinced by how it all supposedly came together.

Overall, not a bad read, certainly intriguing enough to make me want to get to the end but not good enough to say "I liked it".

It's a debut novel so now reserving it for a future round of my "Debut Novels" bookbox.

Added to my "DEBUT NOVEL" Bookbox which will be travelling again before long

Taken from the debut novel bookbox