I read and enjoyed Sam Blake’s Cathy Connolly series starting with Little Bones, so jumped at the chance to be a part of the blog tour for The Dark Room, as always thanks to Anne for the invite (always super communication and professionally organised blog tours). A final thanks to Corvus Books for the review copy. Please so keep scrolling for some bookish chat…

The Blurb

Rachel Lambert leaves London afraid for her personal safety and determined to uncover the truth behind the sudden death of a homeless man with links to a country house hotel called Hare’s Landing.

New York-based crime reporter Caroline Kelly’s career is threatened by a lawsuit and she needs some thinking space away from her job. But almost as soon as she arrives, Hare’s Landing begins to reveal its own stories – a 30-year-old missing person’s case and the mysterious death of the hotel’s former owner.

As Rachel and Caroline join forces, it becomes clear that their investigations are intertwined – and that there is nothing more dangerous than the truth… 

My thoughts…

This is my sort of mystery thriller read; a book dripping with ‘Rebecca vibes’ and saturated with a mystery tinged with the supernatural. I love a good puzzle and this book provides a few, despite still having questions at the end, it’s a satisfyingly welcome escape from our current covid-imprisoned world.

The protagonists are two women, seemingly worlds apart, who are on a course of convergence via a journey of personal reflection, a hunt for answers, the reawakening of the past and its buried secrets; this uncovering is going to bluntly impact their lives and futures. The setting, for the most part, is Hare’s Landing – a house in West Cork that has been containing secrets for many years. It’s now a guest house, where a rather ‘Mrs Danvers’ like employee overseas the guests as they arrive, and certainly keeps an eye on them!

The reader soon becomes hooked into the strange, supernatural occurrences and begins to build the secrets and events into a slow uncovering of the truth. There’s a nice friendship that develops between the two female leads as they join forces to find out they are being targeted. There’s the additional burden of a menacing intruder, a mysterious suicide of the past, a missing person’s investigation to add to the complex twists and turns the women find themselves embroiled in. The pace is steady until 60% in and then it moves swiftly to its conclusion.

A book of secrets, suspicions and murder set in a remote house where the past lives of the two protagonists become entwined in a supernatural edged mystery.

The Author

Sam Blake is a pseudonym for Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin, the founder of The Inkwell Group publishing consultancy and the hugely popular national writing resources website Writing.ie. She is Ireland’s leading literary scout and has assisted many award-winning and bestselling authors to publication. As Sam Blake, she has written four previous novels and has topped the Irish bestseller chart.

The Blog Tour

Please buy from independents if you can XX