To The Last Page

Well, I can't dispute the fact that The Skeleton Key  lives up to its title and the premise that is imprinted on the front cover as "One book. Two families. A Lifetime of Obsession". That comes through abundantly clearly in Erin Kelly's writing and its focus on Eleanor, the young woman caught up in a very unusual family situation. Fifty years ago, her artist father Frank Churcher hit upon an idea of creating a kind of treasure hunt puzzle in a children's book, 'The Golden Bones'. He had no idea of how it would capture the imagination of treasure seekers all over the world, and indeed cause no small amount of disruption to the lives of his and his friend Lal's family. The game, the wealth and the honours that came with it were welcome, but some controversy as well and even some deaths as the final key to the puzzle has remained undiscovered for decades. For Frank's daughter, Eleanor, it was a much more serious matter. Her name is close to her namesa...

As she demonstrated with her previous last novel, the phenomenally successful He Said/She Said , Erin Kelly is a master of sinister throwaway lines, little phrases and nuances dropped into seemingly everyday situations. The intentionally misleading opening scene in Stone Mothers of a blindfolded woman being driven in a car is quickly resolved when it turns out to be a surprise trip organised by her husband Sam, but an air of suspense and concern carries over. It’s not just that the surprise turns out to be an expensive apartment or that it was converted from an old asylum, but Marianne’s reaction suggests that the there is something else that is massively disturbing about Marianne’s return to the Nazareth Pauper Lunatic Asylum. You can quickly discount the idea that Marianne might once have been an inmate at Nazareth hospital, as the Victorian asylum has been closed down for a quite a while, the methods of such ‘stone mothers’ long ago called into question, government reforms and poli...

**Safe review: There are NO SPOILERS below** There are all kinds of paranoia suspense thrillers clogging up the bestseller charts and some of them are pretty unconvincing in their plotting and crude in their use of shock tactics that exploit women's fears and vulnerabilities. Erin Kelly isn't afraid to take on some of those same basic fears but shows how it can be done tactfully, creatively and suspensefully in He Said/She Said . The sense of menace is there right from the start - even the title hints at that idea of conflicting viewpoints from male and female perspectives - and Erin Kelly it builds on it, ramping up the tension at every stage with precision and authenticity in the detail. Kelly's extraordinarily good writing means that He Said/She Said bristles with intrigue and menace right from the first page, even before the nature of the danger is specified. All we know is that Kit and Laura are in hiding, living under assumed names over an incident and a court case t...