Daisy Darker

Daisy Darker was born with a broken heart, and has spent her life being told she might not live long. On Halloween, her fractured family gathers at Seaglass, the crumbling gothic house on a tiny Cornish island that can only be reached at low tide, to mark Nana's eightieth birthday. For a few hours, cut off from the mainland by the rising sea, the Darkers are forced back into one another's company along with all their old grievances.

At the stroke of midnight, Nana is found dead — and a message scrawled on the wall promises that the rest of the family will follow, one an hour, until the tide turns. Trapped together with no way to call for help and no way to leave, the surviving Darkers begin to realise that the killer is almost certainly one of them, and that the family's carefully kept secrets are about to be dragged into the open.

A knowing homage to Agatha Christie's closed-circle mysteries, Daisy Darker combines a stormy, atmospheric setting with Alice Feeney's taste for misdirection. As the hours count down, the story circles back through decades of family history toward a revelation designed to make the reader reconsider everything that came before.