Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* As Justine Merrison moves from London to Speedwell House in Devon, leaving her grueling job in television production, she looks forward to doing nothing. Instead, her world turns increasingly surrealistic until finally she must do something. Justine starts receiving anonymous phone calls from a woman who purports to know her, telling her she must leave Devon. Then Justine's only child, 14-year-old Ellen, admits that her unhappiness started when George Donbavand, her closest friend at her new school, was unjustly expelled, but the staff of the school deny even the existence of such a student. When the anonymous calls become more frightening, threatening to bury Justine, her husband, and daughter, and a hole like a grave is found one morning in their front yard, Justine has gotten what little help she can from police and a private investigator and takes things into her own hands. Interwoven with her travails is an eerie mystery story being written by Ellen for a class that becomes key to what is happening in Justine's life. Hannah has become renowned for her psychological thrillers and has never been more imaginative than she is here, in a plot all the more unsettling, as madness shades into evil, for its quotidian setting.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Former TV producer Justine Merrison, the narrator of this confusing standalone from Hannah (Woman with a Secret), leaves London for Devon, where she vows that doing nothing will be her new occupation. Justine's opera singer husband, Alex, and their 14-year-old daughter, Ellen, settle in with her at Speedwell House. Trouble starts when Justine receives the first in a series of increasingly threatening phone calls from an anonymous woman, who purports to know something unsavory in her past. Meanwhile, Ellen is furiously writing a mystery story for school about the murderous Ingrey family, who live in a house suspiciously reminiscent of Speedwell. Justine worries about the tale's grisly content, but she's distracted by news from school that Ellen's new best friend, George Donbavand, has been unfairly expelled. Later, the school authorities inform Justine that George doesn't exist. In the first in a series of implausible plot twists, Justine discovers potential links between the mysterious Donbavand family and Ellen's story. So much is going on that even dedicated readers will struggle to make sense of it all. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Justine Merrison, a former TV executive, along with her 14-year-old daughter, -Ellen, and successful opera singer husband, Alex, move from London to the South Devon countryside. Justine, determined to recover from a hectic career that ended on a sour note, wants to leave it all behind and do "nothing." The family successfully settles in until Justine receives a series of seemingly crank phone calls from a woman with a lisp. With each call, though, it becomes clearer that the caller knows too much about Justine for this to be a case of mistaken identity. At the same time Justine notices that her relationship with Ellen is becoming strained. To find the cause she reads a writing assignment that had obsessed her daughter: a bizarre story, set in the Merrison home, of a young murderess named Perrine and the dysfunctional way her family tries to deal with her. Disturbed by a connection between the calls and the story, Justine begins what could turn into a perilous search for answers. VERDICT Hannah (Woman with a Secret) has written what could have been a thriller but is instead an odd combination of the suspenseful (Paula Hawkins's The Girl on the Train) and the satirical (-Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette?), with an unbelievable story line and characters whose behaviors are overwhelmingly far fetched, leaving readers befuddled.-Susan Santa, Shelter Rock P.L., Albertson, NY © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A London TV producer who's retired to Devon to get away from it all is terrorized by a series of anonymous phone calls that mercilessly reveal every fault line in the lives of two families, one of them her own. As opera singer Alex Colley's car inches forward in traffic, his wife exults silently: "My name is Justine Merrison and I do Nothing." No more early morning meetings, no more blandishments to strangers, no more guessing which series will have legs. Not even the momentary sense of alarmed recognition that passes over her when Alex teasingly tells Ellen, their 14-year-old daughter, that they've changed plans and decided to move into a random house he points out on the side of the highway can disturb her quietude. Four months later, though, she's plenty disturbed by a series of calls from a woman who refuses to identify herself but says she knows why Justine, whom she insists on calling "Sandie," has moved outside Kingswear and insists she go back to London. Ellen, meanwhile, seems to have settled into the Beaconwood School by writing a story of a family whose youngest daughter is a multiple murderer and a murder victim herself. But Ellen's honeymoon with Beaconwood ends when her best friend, George Donbavand, is expelled for stealing the coat she gave him. Things get worse when Justine goes to the school to plead George's case and head teacher Lesley Griffiths denies that there ever was such a student. Soon enough the deepening mystery forces Justine to confront the real reason she left her old job and her old life in the first place. Plenty of shivery intimations of second sight, but Hannah (Woman with a Secret, 2015, etc.) plots and writes persuasively enough to pull them off. Even after the last clouds have dispersed, you won't soon forget this nightmare within a nightmare. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
