Navigating through human life is, as we all realise, a tricky business. One of the persistent suspicions that may beset us is that people are not all they seem. They may be offering us a persona which conceals hidden motives, desires, tastes, values etc. How well do you really know those that are closest to you? It is because this uncertainty is universal that it features in novels, films, plays, poetry, and fiction of all kinds. T.S. Eliot captures the realisation in lines 26/27 of his poem ‘The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1920, http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html). He writes ‘..there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet..’
American writer Flynn Berry (http://www.flynnberry.com/about/) has given us her version of this in a new psychological thriller –‘Under the Harrow’. The summary is as follows.
When Nora arrives at her sister’s family home in the English countryside for a visit she expects to be met at the station or that Rachel will be at home cooking dinner. Instead she stumbles upon horror. Rachel has been brutally murdered. In the aftermath of Rachel’s death, Nora becomes obsessed with finding the person who killed her sister. But she doesn’t turn to the police, who bungled their response to her own assault in the past. Instead, Nora decides to go it alone.
But the deeper into the mystery she gets, and the more she finds out about who Rachel really was, the more danger Nora gets into herself. This can’t-put-it-down thriller delves into the tenuous relationship between two women who loved each other fiercely, while also lifting the veil on how much is always really concealed. Don’t tell your partner you’re reading this.
Enquire at your local library or consult https://www.amazon.co.uk/Under-Harrow-Flynn-Berry/dp/1474605095/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1471684016&sr=8-1 for further bibliographic detail.
First published 2016
ISBN 978-1474605090
Flynn Berry (as she appears to be)