DAISY DARKER

SYNOPSIS

Daisy Darker’s family were as dark as dark can be, when one of them died all of them lied and pretended not to see . . .

Daisy Darker is arriving at her grandmother’s house for her eightieth birthday. It is Halloween, and Seaglass – the crumbling Cornish house perched upon its own tiny private island – is at one with the granite rocks it sits on. The Darker family haven’t all been in the same place for over a decade, and when the tide comes in they’ll be cut off from the rest of the world for eight hours. When the tide goes back out, nothing will ever be the same again, because one of them is a killer.

Title: Daisy Darker

Author: Alice Feeney

Publisher: Macmillan

Publication date: August 18, 2022

REVIEW

RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐💫

And Then There Were None is my favorite book, so one could think I would hate any retelling of that story, but nuh-uh, give them all to me! Daisy Darker is the last book inspired by the Christie classic, but oh my, it has a twist that made it stand out between all the other ones. It was the perfect locked room mystery mashed up with another hugely popular piece of work. Was it another book? A movie? You will have to read it to find out.

The Darker family is pretty disfunctional: the absent father, the detached mother, the selfish sister, the aloof sister…All of them are summoned to Sea Glass, the family home on a secluded island, to celebrate during Halloween Nana’s 80th birthday. The youngest daughter, Daisy, is the only one that wants to be there, the rest only have their inheritance in mind. When the clock strikes midnight, a scream breaks the silence and the first body is found along a creepy poem that predicts all their deaths. With no means to leave the island until the low tide and with the dead toll increasing every hour, will all of them survive the night?

What a fantastic mix of atmosphere, character study and an engaging plot. Daisy was born with a heart condition that cause her to die and be resuscitated several times before she was 13 yo. That fact alone made her such an interesting character. That Damocles sword over her head made me want to protect her from her family even more! 

The setting was eerie and suited the plot perfectly, helping to build the tension throughout the story. Going back and forth between past and present we’ll learn about Daisy’s childhood and the reason for the current family dynamics.

I gotta confess I was thinking the whole time there was a weird detail I did not know what to make of, but once the twist was revealed it all made perfect sense. I love how the author pushed boundaries, bringing everything together at the end in a truly heartbreaking way.

Gripping story with great writing and some quirky and dark characters that make of Daisy Darker the perfect read for Halloween (that’s if you can wait to read it until then. I couldn’t!)

Thanks to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.