When Frances concocts an elaborate plan to escape today’s world of surveillance, her hopes are soon crushed by long-buried secrets, entwining her life with others forever. Having fled to a remote village in the south-west of France, she employs Julien, a mute builder, to renovate her house. Communicating by notes written on pages torn from a jotter, they form a strange, silent bond, but when a … newcomer moves into the neighbouring property, followed by furtive men inspecting her land in the dead of each night, Frances’ concerns for her privacy spiral. While fighting to defend her covert existence, fear soon turns towards murder, and Frances finds she uncovers a series of gruesome, historic events…
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I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It was suspenseful with brooding and mysterious characters that you just wanted to know everything about. The story was cleverly divided in three parts and I really liked getting those three different stories and points of view. In places shocking and tragic but handled with sensitivity and making you really understand how the characters felt and why they acted in the way they did. Looking forward to reading more books of this writer!
Remarkable.
It wasn’t quite what I expected but was good nonetheless. Frances I thought was quite paranoid, anything beyond normal. She wanted to get away, hide herself from the world. She finds a house in the country and thinks she can escape being “watched”. When the new neighbors move in that changes.
I thought the story had a slow beginning. It builds and the information is important for how the story unfolds. It intrigued me enough to continue listening. I even looked up Frances disease mentioned in the story to see if the side effects to medicine were paranoia and researched the symptoms thinking maybe that was it. I didn’t really find any answers there but as the plot builds more pieces fall into place.
There’s a lot readers don’t know about her from the beginning and its a good mystery that really picks up in the second half of the book. It’s well written and the characters are easy to identify with even those I didn’t like so much. I would recommend the story to anyone who enjoys a mystery.
Hamilton Smyth takes what might have been a routine mystery story and turns it into an extremely tense adventure by creating a heroine with an unusual personality disorder. Frances is obsessed with her personal privacy—so much so that she takes medication to help her control the anxiety her disorder causes her. Unfortunately for her, the modern world is not kind to people who don’t want others knowing what they are doing. Google and its corporate pals spy on everything. The government keeps humongous volumes of information on all of us. Cameras mark our cars’ comings and goings in the streets. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg when you start thinking about shopping, banking, and everything else we do.
Frances decides to leave England and resettle in a small town in southern France to escape everyone’s prying eyes and live quietly with her four cats. She plans her escape in meticulous detail and carefully settles into her new property where she hires (for cash) a handyman to fix up the house and put a fence around her land. Then things go crazy. A new boisterous neighbor buys the house next door and immediately starts intruding on her property. He claims the fence is on his land and his building plans would steal from Frances her sense of safety from prying eyes. She reluctantly engages a lawyer to fight his plans and he physically threatens her.
Now this is the part of the tale where a normal person would go to the police and lodge a complaint—but Frances can’t do that. Police keep records and her disorder doesn’t permit her to get help in the normal fashion, so she has to figure out what is going on and find a solution to her problem on her own.
All of that (Part I of the novel) is great! It’s fast moving, engaging, and suspenseful. I was particularly pleased that I solved the mystery on my own (I don’t always do that) and was shocked by the eventual solution to the problem. Unfortunately, Hamilton-Smyth then spends the next two-thirds of the novel giving details on how the problem that caused the land dispute occurred. I thought all of this was implicit in what Frances discovered in her investigation. I would have much preferred the author to show how Frances—with her peculiar disability—handled the aftermath to the solution to her problem with her neighbor. I see no way for her to keep the authorities from becoming involved and the stress this would have caused her would both further stoke the reader’s sympathy and create a different kind of drama. Perhaps Hamilton-Smyth will show us that in a later book.
That being said, the basic mystery is a very good one and the decision to go with a heroine suffering from Frances’ disability was ingenious. This one is well worth reading.