In Her Blood, Nikki Crutchley

Author Nikki Crutchley always brings an interesting twist, or idea to her novels, and IN HER BLOOD is most definitely a perfect example of that. Gothic in feel, it's a thriller that's based around dual disappearances, with a big time gap, set in a haunted-house scenario with touches of a classic psychodrama, and a wonderful sense of place that carries the multiple timelines with considerable aplomb.

Crutchley's specialty has always been character development, and IN HER BLOOD presents the reader with a bunch of very damaged people, on a discovery tour of each other, and themselves. The story is based around Jac Morgan, back in her hometown for the first time in years, after vowing she'd never return. Years before, the fatal house fire that killed her mother was widely believed to have been her fault, but she's reluctantly returned despite the vow, because her sister, Charlie, has gone missing. Twenty years earlier, same town, Paige Gilmore, talented, beautiful, daughter of eccentric matriarch Iris, also vanished. The search for Charlie draws Jac to the Gilmore Hotel, the site where Paige vanished, the ultimate in haunted houses when Jac was a child. Turns out this hotel is still home to force of nature that is Iris, and her long-suffering surviving daughter, Lisa.

The hotel, it's gothic feel, the oddity of the Gilmore's, the weirdness of the town, and the conflict that Jac feels being back, looking for Charlie, working out what happened twenty years ago, and processing what happened around her mother's death, means there's a lot going on. Never resorting to over the top pacing, it's a slow, particularly creepy build up, where sometimes, just briefly, the dialogue can get a bit wobbly. But the atmosphere, and the depiction of the hotel and those women, all rubbing up against each other, all with secrets, and regrets is particularly effective. Somehow it's the regrets that seem to really come to the fore as everything inexorably marches towards a finale that's suspenseful, creepy, and cleverly executed.

Probably one for reading with the lights on, and preemptive investigation of the possible sources of things that go bump or squeak. Most definitely one for people exploring the nature of secrets, small towns, mysteries and the past never quite going away.