I have to say straight off that I really enjoyed Lucy Scott’s reading of this book. She is one of those readers who you could enjoy listening to, whatever she is reading. She also did a great job with the accents.
The book opens with Anna leaving her London job to move to Dorset, where her husband has been offered a new position. Their new home is in the village of Abbots Newton. A picturesque white cottage in a small village. It all sounds idyllic, and exactly right for a writer - Anna has had her first novel published, but as yet has no ideas for a second book.
Within days, with no job and no ideas for a new book, Anna is increasingly restless - although she has met her next door neighbour Liz, she doesn’t feel that she is likely to become a soul mate. I did feel a certain impatience with Anna she has the sort of life most of us would kill for and basically all she does is moan. Liz invites her for a coffee morning, but she doesn’t take to the women she meets - in fact she takes a positive dislike to Helen. However, she perks up when she overhears a conversation in the village shop and learns that the previous owner of her beautiful cottage was none other than the notorious child murderess of the 1960's Rebecca Fisher. Could this be the basis of her new book? Although not a True Crime writer, Anna feels that she could base a novel on Rebecca Fisher. And so she begins researching the case.
As she starts her research, odd things start to happen, and then she begins to feel threatened herself, and although her husband and her best friend Petra ask her to stop her research, she feels compelled to continue.
It’s a good story with a dramatic climax, but I do have to say that I found
some of the things Anna did or didn’t do bizarre in the extreme. She refused
to tell anyone she was a writer, being extremely embarrassed about it - I couldn’t
get my head around that one. Also there seemed to be a complete absence of an
agent or publisher asking where the new book was. I suppose she may not have
had a contract but she did have a rather odd attitude to being a writer.
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Lizzie Hayes