Morning Everyone,

Hope you’re all having a good week. I’ve had quite a busy one so I haven’t been able to do as much reading as I would have liked, but that’s ok. I break up from work for a week today so I’m sure I’ll be able to catch up on plenty.

Book 📖

Thank you to @macmillan.audio for this advanced audio copy of Daisy Darker by @alicewriterland in return for an honest review. Daisy Darker was published on 18th August 2022 and you can get a copy here.

Description 🔖

Daisy Darker and the rest of her family are spending the night at her grandmothers house for her eightieth birthday. She lives in an impressive yet crumbling house called Seaglass which sits on the Cornish coast and is surrounded by cliffs and granite rocks. It’s quite the setting for a Halloween birthday.

The Darker family haven’t all been together in over a decade and they’re about to be stuck together for eight hours. Once the tide comes in, they’re unable to leave Seaglass until the morning. At which point, nothing will be the same, because amongst them, there is a killer.

General Thoughts 🤔

I don’t think I expected this book to be quite as “whodunnit” as it was, but I was grateful for it. It was a great mystery tale, using a classic format; a group of people stuck together, one by one they start dropping dead. The killer has to be one of them. This kind of story really gets my juices flowing as I love trying to piece it all together and work out what’s going on.

The different murders were cleverly done and I loved the role the poem had to play in the mystery. As per the poem, nearly everyone in the Darker family had motive; none of them were particularly nice people. The ending was what unfortunately disappointed me with this book. It felt like it was an easy way out to wrap up what was a fantastic story before it.

Characters 👫👭👬

I don’t think there was a character that I actually liked in this story, but I don’t feel like I was supposed to. I struggled to warm to Daisy even though she was the narrator and I probably should have sympathised with her. She didn’t have an easy childhood, there’s no doubt about that but there was just something about her that made me feel distant from her.

Both of Daisy’s sisters were unbearable but Rose was the one I could probably tolerate the most. I had my suspicions about her involvement with the murders most of the way through, but she at least seemed to be quite a caring and considerate person underneath it all.

Writing Style ✍️

As mentioned above, I really loved the way the different murders were done and they were cleverly written to allow there to be many possibilities for whodunnit. Everyone at Seaglass had motive, but I loved the way that the author revealed those motives slowly as the story progressed.

That was done via the past tense sections that were covered by the family videos. I love when books use a different medium to tell the story so I really enjoyed this aspect of the book. And of course dual timelines is my love language.

Conclusion & Scoring 🎖

I really enjoyed 85% of this book and I would love to read the beginning section again to piece everything together and let all of the pennies drop. It was only the ending that I can’t help but feel disappointed by. It didn’t completely ruin the book for me, but I wish it had been something different. Otherwise, a great whodunnit that kept me engaged and going back for more.

😍😍😍😩😩