Will I love Daisy Darker?

I loved Daisy Darker because it was haunting and impossible to put down.

The eerie, locked-in setting gave me chills, and every page pulled me deeper in. I kept thinking I had the mystery solved, but the ending shocked me completely. I closed the book in awe and couldn’t stop thinking about it. 

This is a fiction, fortunately, where family members are bumped off by one of their number who covets the family home in Cornwall. It provides a relief to the seriousness of my earlier choices in the vein of “Kind Hearts and Coronets” which was made famous by the actor Alec Guiness. 

I enjoyed this book co-incidentally whilst in Cornwall, the setting for this story of familial murder. It is a classic Agatha Christie style story with eight members of the Darker family trapped on a private island off the coast of Cornwall in the crumbling ancestral home they all want… show more.

I was hooked from the moment young Daisy Darker–she of the “broken heart”–introduced me to her grandmother’s tidal island family home, complete with a wall of clocks. I generally prefer first-person novels like this, and Daisy’s perspective kept this story moving. A bizarre cast of characters navigate questionable relationships–family…yes? No?–from Daisy’s unique point of view that eventually crumbles into the sea. And the mysterious messages that show up on the kitchen blackboard each morning…what a puzzle! Too bad I couldn’t solve it before the end.

I’m sure Feeney must have given readers some clues along the way that I managed… show more.

Sticking with the ‘could this family be any more toxic’ theme, Daisy Darker is another WTF did I just read thriller. A h/t to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, the setting sets the mood right from the start. Nana’s house Seaglass is on an atmospheric island and includes quirky features like eighty clocks on one wall. The family’s bad behavior is called out when Nana reads her will, which is timely since the next morning she’s found dead. Alice Feeney has a brilliant way with words, she says the creepiest things in the most beautiful way.