‘Your tattoo… it’s exactly like mine.’ She hesitates. ‘But – I’ve never noticed it before. I must have had it since I was little.’ The ink markings on both of them are delicate, barely visible. Interlinked triangles in the shape of a daisy. But how can two strangers have matching tattoos, they didn’t know they had?
With their parents gone and nobody left to ask, when Georgia and Oliver first come to amateur sleuth Millie Westlake for help with their daisy-shaped markings she thinks the tattoos are a joke. A funny, if unusual, link between two strangers. In the seaside town of Whitecliff, stranger things have happened – especially to Millie herself.
But then Millie finds an artist who remembers giving someone the same tattoo twenty years ago. Someone who spent years hiding in the isolated woods outside Whitecliff – the same place unidentified bodies were once found…
Even as Millie gets closer to answers, she witnesses a shocking robbery that changes everything. And as whispers of what happened in the woods decades ago become louder, how much danger will Millie, Georgia and Oliver put themselves in, to uncover the mystery of the daisy-shaped markings and the dark truth about their pasts?
This gripping and character-driven mystery read is perfect for fans of Faith Martin, Ann Cleeves and LJ Ross.
Kerry Wilkinson is from the English county of Somerset but has spent far too long living in the north. It’s there that he’s picked up possibly made-up regional words like ‘barm’ and ‘ginnel’. He pretends to know what they mean.
He’s also been busy since turning thirty: his Jessica Daniel crime series has sold more than a million copies in the UK; he has written a fantasy-adventure trilogy for young adults; a second crime series featuring private investigator Andrew Hunter and the standalone thriller, Down Among The Dead Men.
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My thoughts: another weird case for Millie and Guy in Whitecliff Bay, a town i am very glad is fictional. This time it’s a strange tattoo on the back of two complete strangers’ ears that leads to a cult that used to exist in the woods outside town. The cult ended in fire and death but a few ex-members exist and someone must have some answers.
Meanwhile Millie’s personal life is still a mess – she wants custody of her son and is willing to exploit her ex-husband’s secrets to get it, and she needs to confront a friend about the email that outed her affair. Her friends Jack and Rishi are on the outs and even Guy’s acting a bit strangely. His late wife’s obnoxious nephew Craig is hanging about and after cash.
Then there’s the shop robbery Millie witnessed, the police think they have their man, but Millie’s not convinced – and neither is the man’s girlfriend. So of course Millie’s going to investigate.
With all of this going on, life’s never quiet, and Millie doesn’t have much appetite despite all the food she seems to be around, I wish people would randomly bring me a bakery’s worth of treats. Though I don’t get Luke’s toast thing still. And we still need answers about Millie’s parents. Roll on the next weird and brilliant Whitecliff Bay mystery.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 