Thank you for joining us for our special spotlight feature for The Child Garden, a Psychological Suspense by Catriona McPherson (8 September 2015, Midnight Ink, 312 pages). PREVIEW: Read the first three chapters with Amazon Look Inside.
Check out the book's synopsis and the excerpt below, as well as our Q&A with author Catriona McPherson.
Synopsis | Teaser | Author Q&A | About the Author |
Synopsis
A long-lost friend is a stranger you think you know.Eden was its name. “An alternative school for happy children.” But it closed in disgrace after a student’s suicide. Now it’s a care home, the grounds neglected and overgrown. Gloria Harkness is its only neighbor, staying close to her son who lives in the home, lighting up her life and breaking her heart each day.
When a childhood friend turns up at her door, Gloria doesn’t hesitate before asking him in. He claims a girl from Eden is stalking him and has goaded him into meeting near the site of the suicide. Only then, the dead begin to speak—it was murder, they say.
Gloria is in over her head before she can help it. Her loneliness, her loyalty, and her all-consuming love for her son lead her into the heart of a dark secret that threatens everything she lives for.
Teaser: Excerpt
PROLOGUE
1985It was far from silent in the dark wood. There were mice, rats too maybe, scuffling in the undergrowth, and the heavier tread of a hedgehog as it moved along the line of trees and later made its way back again. An owl’s wings beat softly, rustling the leaves in the canopy, and just once a fox barked, setting all the nesting birds peeping their alarm.
Underneath these living sounds, the river glugged and churned, sucking at stuck logs and nudging at pebbles. Further downstream the waterfall fizzed over the rocks at the edge of the drop and crashed into the pool below.
So it can’t have been quiet enough to hear all those sounds when the end came. It was imagination filling them in, nothing more. No one could have picked out a soft creak, a sigh, the sound of cloth rubbing on cloth as his arms and legs clutched at nothing while he pinwheeled down. Even the splash as he entered the water was a quiet one. It could have been a rock dislodged or a piece of the bank collapsing.
Afterwards, the noises of the wood at night must have carried on— nothing to frighten the birds, nothing to stop the rats in their endless scurrying. Now it was only fear making the silence grow until it boomed. Now it was the very act of listening that blotted away all the sound. Now the clamourous thoughts themselves hushed every other thing besides them.
Those same thoughts were still racing around chasing their tails when the car engine started, roaring like a fairy tale monster, bringing real life and all the trouble in the world back into focus with a snap!
Time to think fast and get it right. Time to make sure only one life ended here tonight. He was gone— no getting him back again, no point going with him.
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About the Author
Catriona was born in Scotland and lived there until 2010, before moving to California. A former bank clerk, library worker and academic, she is the multi- award-winning author of the Dandy Gilver detective stories, set in Scotland in the 1920s. She also writes a strand of award-winning contemporary standalones including THE DAY SHE DIED and COME TO HARM.Catriona is a proud member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, The Crimewriters’ Association, The Society of Authors and Scottish PEN. She is the 2014/15 president of Sisters in Crime (National).
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