But for a book like this to be truly effective, Feeney needed to crank the dial on atmosphere, amping up the way foreboding swirls of mist crawled along the shore outside, or how the damp, dark interiors of Seaglass start to close in on its inhabitants as the night goes on.

Trixie tells Daisy to remember the Halloween party in 1988, the one where Daisy hid in the trunk of Conor’s car. Connor Kennedy: Connor isn’t actually part of the family, but because part of it once the Darker girls sort of fell in love with him and wanted to help him and get him out of the toxic and abusive household he lived in after the death of his mother and his father started drinking. The Victorian house with its gothic turrets and turquoise tiled roof is situated on the Cornish coast, in a spot that cuts it off from the rest of the world for eight hours, whenever the tide comes in.

She reveals that although Lily and Nancy tried to drug her, she dumped the drugged tea into a potted plant. Thank you so much to the publisher, Macmillan Audio, for providing me with a copy to read and review. I had a feeling this was an And Then There Were None situation but the supernatural twist was welcome. Connor goes out to investigate and finds Nancy dead, holding a locket with a picture of Daisy inside. Well, that's not necessarily true, Trixie, Lily's often-neglected daughter, is always kind to her Aunt Daisy, so at least Daisy has two allies within the family; not a total loss.

Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. The present timeline is at least tolerable because things are happening (albeit slowly and feebly), but it's such a small part of the whole book.Final twist 1: I read And Then There Were None… I remember the ending… To compare Daisy Darker to this classic is a spoiler in the blurb! The entire book takes place in less than twenty-four hours, during a time when the family has gathered to celebrate the birthday of Nana (on Halloween!

True to its prophecy, one by one the Darker family dies, which has earned this novel several comparisons to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None . It’s fascinating to watch the strange cruelties and the sparks of love they deliver to one another, sometimes moving from meanness to affection within moments. Like my favorite resident says every time she sees me: the secret to having it all is knowing that you already do. Alice Feeney FILLS her books with tiny details and I’m sure I won’t get them all, so PLEASE add your thoughts in comments. Daisy, much younger than both of them, just wanted to be included in whatever they did—from Easter pageants to teen parties.It is Halloween, and Seaglass – the crumbling Cornish house perched upon its own tiny private island – is at one with the granite rocks it sits on. Daisy was very close to Trixie, and from the beginning of the novel, the reader was left to see them as a close-knit team. Worse things than the fact that everyone is a liar, hates everyone else, and that everyone I suspect they wanted to live forever too, but they settled for living off the book’s royalties instead.