Notorious because 10 years earlier, she was part of the jury ruling on the disappearance of 15-year-old heiress Jessica Silver, who vanished on the way home from school. But this has nothing to do with anything: Maya, it turns out, is a notorious woman herself. We meet her successfully defending a woman who has cut her abusive husband’s head off with a pair of gardening shears. Maya Seale is a brilliant defence attorney.
Everyone appears to have a motive and a dark tragic secret in their past, and the mounting sense of doom is piled on pretty thick. The body is, again, discovered early on, and Foley’s narrative again flits between alternative points of view: Jules, the perfectionist bride trying not to think about the mysterious note she received the celebrity groom and his old school friends who went to the sort of horrific boarding school where “only the strong survived” the wedding planner who thinks, “terrible things happen, I learned that while I was still a child”. Her second follows a similar formula – this time, it’s a wedding on a remote Irish island, where the friends are trapped by a storm. Lucy Foley’s first thriller, The Hunting Party, told the story of a party of old friends snowed in at a Highland lodge when a murder occurs. The dreamy nature of the story slowly dissipates as the danger deepens, leaving this reader with pounding heart and sweating palms. And then, painfully and honestly, there’s the world of DS Mairead MacCullagh, who might be exactly the right woman for the job, but is also trying to ignore the miscarriage she might be in the middle of. There’s a nightmarish, fairytale quality to Sam Lloyd’s debut thriller, which switches between timelines and perspectives: the horrors Elissa’s mother is going through the strange life Elijah leads the brilliantly sharp mind of Elissa as she weighs up her options for escape. He’s never had a proper friend, and now that he’s stumbled upon Elissa, he’s reluctant to let her go. Here she is found by Elijah, 12, who has always lived in the woods. She has been kidnapped from outside the chess tournament she was competing in, and is being kept in a cellar beneath the woods.
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