Wednesday, 10 July 2019

The Stranger Diaries

This is a stand-alone from Elly Griffiths and it kept me reading till late!


Amazon UK link

Amazon US link

Book description

A dark story has been brought to terrifying life. Can the ending be rewritten in time?

This is what the police know: English teacher Clare Cassidy's friend Ella has just been murdered. Clare and Ella had recently fallen out. Found beside the body was a line from The Stranger, a story by the Gothic writer Clare teaches, and the murder scene is identical to one of the deaths in the story.
This is what Clare knows: No one else was aware of her fight with Ella. Few others have even read The Stranger. Someone has wormed their way into her life and her work. They know her darkest secrets. And they don't mean well.
This is what the killer knows: Who will be next to die.

My review - 
I do love a bit of gothic and this combined a short ghost story from a previous era with a modern day murder mystery. The story is told from three points of view – Clare, a teacher, Georgia, her daughter and Harbinder Kaur, the DS looking into the murder of a friend of Clare’s. I enjoyed this aspect as we got to see what each thought of the other and how they interpreted what had happened. The ghost story ran through the narrative and was told in its entirely at the end. The main story centred on the school where Clare taught and Georgia was a pupil. It was the former home of the author of the short ghost story and the mixing of the two was, for me, really well done. There are more bodies and it’s down to Harbinder Kaur and the team to discover the murderer. I honestly never guessed. A great book.

About the author

Elly Griffiths was born in London. The inpsiration for her books about forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway came from her husband who gave up a city job to train as an archaeologist. Elly lives near Brighton but often spends holidays on the wild Norfolk coast. She has two children and a cat.

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Just a thought 

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. 
― Henry David Thoreau

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