The Staffymum's Book Nook: EXTRACT: The Daughters by Julia Crouch

Monday, 30 May 2022

EXTRACT: The Daughters by Julia Crouch

The Daughters by Julia Crouch

Genre: Psychological thriller, Suspense

Read: 23rd May 2022

Goodreads

Amazon

Published: 26th May 2022

DESCRIPTION:

My father said my mother killed herself. My sister says he’s lying.

The day of our mother’s funeral, my little sister Lucy and I clung to our father’s side. He promised he’d get us through it, and we believed him. But then I discovered that the coffin we wept over was empty.

Dad says he was trying to protect us – that he thought it would be easier to grieve if we didn’t know our mother’s body was never found.

His new wife says she just wants to help us move on from the past.

Then Lucy has a flash of memory that leaves her shaking. Our father. A woman she doesn’t recognise. A knife…

She insists she knows something about the day our mother died, but it’s buried too deep to see clearly.

What happened to our mother? I need to find the truth. But I have no idea who I can trust. And what if the answer puts my life in danger?

A completely gripping psychological thriller that will make your heart pound as you try to decide who is telling the truth. Perfect for fans of Lisa Jewell, Paula Hawkins and Gillian Flynn.

EXTRACT:

For ten years now, Sara has spent half an hour on 30 May on her iPad, watching her family lay flowers at her mother Alice’s memorial tree. For ten years now she has wished that, like that first, awful grief-scarred time, she could be there in person.

The discovery she made last night about her mother’s death means that the urge to be there this year, on what would have been Alice’s fifty-sixth birthday, is so strong that it physically hurts her.

Sara’s stepmother Carys stands by the tree, her lean brown fingers wound around poor Lucy’s blue-white hands, her close-cropped hair resting against Lucy’s orange frizz. Carys is a good six inches shorter, but the way Lucy – Sara’s eighteen-year-old baby sister – leans against her makes it clear who is doing the supporting.

Carys has made herself indispensable to the family since she moved in less than a year after Alice’s suicide.

Supposed suicide, Sara corrects herself.

And that’s the uncertainty now burning a hole in her mind.

It’s early morning over there, and the camera lens is misted by a late-spring drizzle. Binnie, the five-year-old half-sister Sara has never met, stands next to Carys in a practical lime-green cagoule. Her head is somewhere else, in the land of My Little Pony or Pokémon, or whatever girls her age are into. She’s very sweet. She’s also proof, if any were needed, that Carys has truly embedded herself in the family.

And unlike Sara, Binnie – short for Robina – is actually there.

Also absent is Bill: Sara, Lucy and Binnie’s father, Alice’s widower, Carys’s much older husband. As with most years, his back is too bad for him to stand for the ceremony. He attends instead in one of the boxes on Sara’s iPad, looking on from the Muswell Hill house. The tears in his eyes as he watches the ceremony show everyone how much he loved Alice.

Everyone loved Alice.

MEET THE AUTHOR:

Julia started off as a theatre director and playwright. While her children were growing up, she swerved into graphic design. After writing and illustrating two children’s books for an MA, she discovered that her great love was writing prose. The picture books were deemed too dark for publication, so, to save the children, she turned instead to writing for adults. Her first book, Cuckoo, was published in 2011, and she has been writing what she calls her Domestic Noir novels ever since. She also writes for TV and teaches on the Crime Writing MA at the University of East Anglia. She has three grown up children and lives in Brighton with her husband and two cats, Keith and Sandra.