I used to visit Dungeness and Romney Marsh when I was a kid and I loved how bleak and desolate it appeared to be. I loved the idea of living on the beach. In later years I also had the good fortune to visit a Martello Tower which is described here too. And the entire mood of those visits was captured here from someone, I suspect, who loves the place too. So from the start there was much to endear me to this novel.
For me this book was a slow burner, building up very nicely until I just couldn’t put it down. There are so many red herrings you could open a stall at Billingsgate and I just never second guessed any of them!!
To a certain extent I would say some of this story is contrived but intelligently contrived so it didn’t grate. It was a fine line between four and five stars and I deferred to four because of this and the slowish start. The tension was palpable. It was contemporary, well plotted and the main character, Morgan Vine was real, flawed and vulnerable as we all are, but tenacious too and all the more a heroine to me, because of it. The book gives us two stories, Morgan the adult now and Morgan as an adolescent. The two work well in tandem and fuel the psychological aspects of the tale and inform our perceptions and understanding of her current situation. All the ends are tied up and the two tales dovetail into a satisfactory conclusion.
For me this book was a slow burner, building up very nicely until I just couldn’t put it down. There are so many red herrings you could open a stall at Billingsgate and I just never second guessed any of them!!
To a certain extent I would say some of this story is contrived but intelligently contrived so it didn’t grate. It was a fine line between four and five stars and I deferred to four because of this and the slowish start. The tension was palpable. It was contemporary, well plotted and the main character, Morgan Vine was real, flawed and vulnerable as we all are, but tenacious too and all the more a heroine to me, because of it. The book gives us two stories, Morgan the adult now and Morgan as an adolescent. The two work well in tandem and fuel the psychological aspects of the tale and inform our perceptions and understanding of her current situation. All the ends are tied up and the two tales dovetail into a satisfactory conclusion.