THE CROOKED HOUSE by Christobel Kent - SIGNED FIRST EDITION BOOK
See all titles by Christobel Kent.
Published in the United Kingdom in 2015, Christobel Kent's The Crooked House
has drawn comparisons to works by the pantheon of British female
literary suspense writers--Daphne du Maurier, Agatha Christie, P. D.
James, and Kate Atkinson. In this darkly atmospheric psychological
thriller, she accomplishes what those celebrated writers do best: she
creates an insular world (a single house, a small town) where something
sinister has occurred, and subtly inflects each page with the toxic
residue of violence.
Much like the unnamed narrator of Rebecca,
Alison lives her life under the radar. She has no ties, no home, and
she spends her days at a backroom publishing job. Which is how she wants
it. Because Alison used to be a teenager named Esme, who lived in a
dilapidated house by a bleak estuary with her parents and three
siblings. One night, something unspeakable happened in the house, and
Alison emerged the only survivor. In order to escape from the horror she
witnessed, she moved away from her village, changed her name, and cut
herself off from her past.
Only now her boyfriend invites her to a
wedding in her old hometown, and she decides that if she's going to
have any chance of overcoming the trauma of what happened, she'll have
to confront it. But soon Alison realizes that that night's events have
left a terrible mark on everyone in the village, and she begins to
suspect that they are all somehow implicated in her family's murder.