In her latest novel, The Couple at No.9, Claire Douglas explores the nightmare scenario of what happens when building work unearths human remains in the back garden of a young couple’s new home. When pregnant Saffron Cutler moves into 9 Skelton Place with boyfriend Tom and sets about renovations, the last thing she expects is builders uncovering a body. Two bodies, in…
Curated by book squirrels
It’s something I promise myself I’ll do every year and never manage. That is, until this year. For the first time ever, I’ve read the entire Women’s Prize shortlist before the winner’s announced later today. Not only that but I finished reading the final book, Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, on Sunday. That’s right, with three whole…
Heidi Amsinck’s novel My Name is Jensen is the first in a new series featuring investigative journalist Jensen, only ever known by that one name and recently returned from assignment as London correspondent for the Danish national newspaper Dagbladet to its Copenhagen HQ. Guilty. One word on a beggar’s cardboard sign. And now he is dead, stabbed in a wintry…
A desperate phone-call in the middle of the night shatters so much more than the peace and tranquility of a family holiday in Gillian McAllister’s sixth novel That Night. During a family holiday in Italy, you get an urgent call from your sister. There’s been an accident: she hit a man with her car and he’s dead. She’s overcome with…
Someone might be getting away with murder in Romy Hausmann’s novel, Sleepless, an ambitious cat-and-mouse thriller, about guilt, coercive control, social inequality, retribution and justice. It’s over, my angel. Today I’m going to die. Just like her. He’s won.It’s been years since Nadja Kulka was convicted of a cruel crime. After being released from prison, she’s wanted nothing more than…
In Nicola Moriarty’s You Need to Know we meet the Lewis family, as they approach the first anniversary of a tragic accident in the run-up to Christmas, in itself a stressful enough time for most families. Jill’s three grown-up sons mean everything to her. She would do anything for her boys – protect them, lie for them, even die for…
Author Egan Hughes mixes a potent cocktail of past trauma and mental health issues with a young couple’s switch to rural living and our growing dependency on tech to create a fraught and unnerving suspense in Leave the Lights On. Their new ‘smart home’ is Joe’s dream. A remote cottage where everything – from the lighting to the locks –…
The locked-room murder mystery that she’s neatly stitched it into is entirely her own creation but the inspiration behind Hope Adams’ novel Dangerous Women is the Rajah quilt, an actual quilt made by convicts on their 1841 voyage of transportation from London to Van Diemen’s Land. (What we now know as Tasmania, Australia’s island state, following a name change in…
Emma Stonex takes as her inspiration for The Lamplighters a real event from 1900, where three lighthouse keepers vanished from the Flannan Isles Lighthouse on Eilean Mòr in the Outer Hebrides. Moving the action to Cornwall in 1972 and making hers a rock lighthouse, fifteen miles off the coast from Lands End, she creates a compelling locked room mystery together…
21 January is one of our favourite days here at Nut Press because it’s Squirrel Appreciation Day, which means extra helpings of nuts for Squizzey and the squirrel crew who work so tirelessly (at least a full afternoon a week!) behind the scenes to make him and this blog look good, and the outdoor squirrels, who get a bonus feed…