Book Review / The Crooked House by Christobel Kent

Alison is as close to anonymous as she can get: with no ties, no home, a backroom job, hers is a life lived under the radar. She's a nobody; she has no-one and that's how she wants it.

But once Alison was someone else: once she was Esme Grace, a teenager whose bedroom sat at the top of a remote and dilapidated house on the edge of a bleak estuary. A girl whose family, if not happy, exactly, was no unhappier than anyone else's—or so she thought.

Then one night a terrible thing happened in the crooked house, a nightmare of violence out of which Alison emerged the only witness and sole survivor and from which she has been running ever since. Only when she meets academic Paul Bartlett does Alison realize that if she's to have any chance of happiness, she has to return to her old life and confront the darkness that worked its way inside her family and has pursued her ever since..

Published:     23rd April 2015
Publisher:  Sphere
Goodreads :  Click here
Series or Stand-Alone:  Stand-Alone
Source:  Review Copy from Publisher

What I loved about this book...
I really enjoyed this story.  This is a new author to me and I have a feeling I will be looking into reading more of her work.  This book was actually so creepy (especially when describing what happened to Alison's family) I didn't want to read this at night.  What I loved the most about this story was the creep factor.  There is really great suspense in this story where you see what happened to Alison in the past and try to figure out what really happened together with the fact that there are some creepy things happening to Alison now which made me wonder if the past wasn't going to stay in the past!  This book kept me looked right to the very end.  

There are a lot of secrets in this story that are revealed gradually as the story progresses.  Some I had guessed and some I was really surprised at.  There were  definitely some family secrets that I had not guessed at and were really interesting to read.  

I do have to say that this book does touch on an adult sensitive subject.  I can't say what that is as that would spoil part of the story but just in case you don't like that kind of thing I thought I would just mention it here to let you know.

Christobel Kent was born in London in 1962 and now lives in Cambridge with her husband and four children; in between she lived in Florence. 

She worked in publishing for several years, most recently as Publicity Director at Andre Deutsch. Her debut novel A Party in San Niccolo, was published in 2003.