Hi there book worms! After an extended summer break we are back and raring to go for 2022!
Below is a quick summary of the five choices for you to vote on for the book we read in January. I hope there is something there for everyone. To cast your vote, hop on over to our Book Club Facebook page here. Big love, Amanda xx
TWILIGHT – PETER JAMES
The premise of this book is horrifying and fascinating in equal measure!
Three muffled thuds ring from the partially filled grave of the newly wed girl.
Only the verger hears them and he dismisses the noise as his imagination. But over the next few days others also hear faint sounds.
An exhumation order is granted. Reporter Kate Hemingway sneaks into the small suburban churchyard when the coffin is opened, and the scene she witnesses is so horrific she can never forget it. As she starts work on the story, Kate finds herself caught up in a sinister and macabre cover-up.
At the centre is a respected anaesthetist who has a secret obsession. He believes people can exist outside their bodies and that if he can prove it he will provide the answer to the question that has haunted mankind through the ages: is there life after death?
Nothing – and no one – is going to stand in the way of his driving ambition . . .
THE MAN BEHIND CLOSED DOORS – MARIA FRANKLAND
What could be so bad that a six-year-old stops talking?
Domestic violence isn’t only perpetrated by men. Ask Paul Jackson who is on remand, accused of stabbing his wife, Michelle.
As he reveals his reality behind their troubled marriage, it seems that only his six-year-old knows what really happened. But she’s trapped in her own world of silence.
Paul is arrested after calling for help following a vicious marital row. Given the severity of his wife’s injuries, he is remanded into custody, despite his protestations of innocence.
His defence centres on his heart breaking backstory of being an abused husband. This, he says, has been going on for many years. Paul insists that behind closed doors, he is the victim of his vengeful and insecure wife.
Ultimately, who is the victim and who is the perpetrator is for the judge and the jury to decide. Yet maybe, there is someone other than Paul and Michelle who knows the truth… Someone who knows the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
THE COUPLE AT NO. 9 – CLAIRE DOUGLAS 
It was the house of their dreams. Until the bodies were found . . .
BODIES FOUND UNDER PATIO
When pregnant Saffron Cutler moves into 9 Skelton Place with boyfriend Tom and sets about renovations the last thing she expects is builders uncovering a body – two bodies, in fact.
POLICE INVESTIGATE
Forensics indicate the bodies have been buried at least thirty years. Nothing Saffy need worry herself over. Until the police launch a murder investigation and ask to speak to the cottage’s former owner – her grandmother, Rose.
OWNER QUESTIONED
Rose is in a care home and Alzheimer’s means her memory is increasingly confused. She can’t help the police but it is clear she remembers something.
A KILLER AT LARGE?
As Rose’s fragmented memories resurface, and the police dig ever deeper, Saffy fears she and the cottage are being watched.
What happened thirty years ago?
Why did no one miss the victims?
What part did her grandmother play?
And is Saffy now in danger?
MAGPIE LANE – LUCK ATKINS
When the eight-year-old daughter of an Oxford College Master vanishes in the middle of the night, police turn to the Scottish nanny, Dee, for answers. As Dee looks back over her time in the Master’s Lodging—an eerie and ancient house—a picture of a high achieving but dysfunctional family emerges: Nick, the fiercely intelligent and powerful father; his beautiful Danish wife Mariah, pregnant with their child; and the lost little girl, Felicity, almost mute, seeing ghosts, grieving her dead mother.
But is Dee telling the whole story? Is her growing friendship with the eccentric house historian, Linklater, any cause for concern? And most of all, why was Felicity silent?
Roaming Oxford’s secret passages and hidden graveyards, Magpie Lane explores the true meaning of family—and what it is to be denied one.
THE SANATORIUM – SARAH PEARSE 
You won’t want to leave. . . until you can’t.
Half-hidden by forest and overshadowed by threatening peaks, Le Sommet has always been a sinister place. Long plagued by troubling rumors, the former abandoned sanatorium has since been renovated into a five-star minimalist hotel.
An imposing, isolated getaway spot high up in the Swiss Alps is the last place Elin Warner wants to be. But Elin’s taken time off from her job as a detective, so when her estranged brother, Isaac, and his fiancée, Laure, invite her to celebrate their engagement at the hotel, Elin really has no reason not to accept.
Arriving in the midst of a threatening storm, Elin immediately feels on edge–there’s something about the hotel that makes her nervous. And when they wake the following morning to discover Laure is missing, Elin must trust her instincts if they hope to find her. With the storm closing off all access to the hotel, the longer Laure stays missing, the more the remaining guests start to panic.
Elin is under pressure to find Laure, but no one has realized yet that another woman has gone missing. And she’s the only one who could have warned them just how much danger they are all in. . .
