Many thanks to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for the DRC of this novel. All opinions expressed in this review are my own. Olive nods at Sarah’s flask. “Suppose you did it while you were drunk. You mightn’t even remember.” Wilding is from Newcastle upon Tyne, works as a tutor, and has an MA in creative writing from The University of Manchester, where her tutors included Jeanette Winterson, who recommended her writing to Evans at PFD.

Wilding revealed she was “absolutely buzzing”, adding: “This twisted story has lived in my head for so long and I am so happy it’s found the perfect home at Baskerville.” Special thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free, electronic ARC of this novel received in exchange for an honest review.

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Nova was a very late addition. When I first started writing, I didn’t really have an interest in who had done it, I just wanted to focus on the stories of all of these women. The seven came from the idea of seven deadly sins. One of them has been undermined at work, one has been raped, one has been cheated on – each woman embodies a sin. I’d written 20,000 words of what I thought would be the book but Jeanette explained how I needed to restructure it and why I needed a detective, so Nova is supposed to be an embodiment of the spirit of Newcastle. She’s called Nova after Novocastrian (a word for a Newcastle native) and she’s got a tattoo of magpies. I wanted her to be the person who is friendly and interested but also not scared to look at things from an unorthodox angle. I was really pleased with her character in the end.’ Earlier in the evening, seven women received a message from an unknown number asking them to gather in the “usual place” at 7 PM for an emergency meeting.

A propulsive and complexly layered story...Fans of Lucy Foley and Ruth Ware won’t want to miss this one." – Nora Murphy, author of The Favor The book plays about with time, and necessitates a regrouping now and again to sort out where the reader is in the timeline of the story. This does seem a popular thing to do at the moment, and I do not like it, but it takes only seconds to arrange your mind and you are on your way again and following the story. The story opens with the discovery of the decapitated head of Jamie by a group of seven women with ties to the victim on New Year’s Eve 1999. We learn about Jamie’s connection to each of the women and the history that they share throughout the book. We do also see the police detective’s perspective as we work our way through the story. It was quite a few characters to juggle but each of them had such unique personalities that I had no trouble keeping things straight. It was obvious that all of the women had the motive but I wasn’t sure who the murderer was until it was revealed in the story. A devilishly immersive read – Rose Wilding is a wonderful new talent’ Kamila Shamsie, author of Home FireBaskerville has secured “a literary whodunit" from tutor Rose Wilding for six figures as part of a 24-hour pre-empt.