TOUR, REVIEW & #GIVEAWAY - The Sweetest Poison (Pitfourie #1) by Jane Renshaw
@GoddessFish, @hotchoc84 (Charlotte),
When life has cast you in the role of victim, how do you find the strength to fight back?
When she was eight years old, Helen Clack was bullied so mercilessly that she was driven to a desperate act. Now she is being targeted once more, but this time her tormentor’s identity is shrouded in doubt.
When her life starts to disintegrate, she flees home to the wilds of north-east Scotland, and to the one man she knows can help her – Hector Forbes, the dubiously charismatic Laird of Pitfourie, with whom she has been hopelessly in love ever since those hellish days in the school playground, when he was her protector, her rescuer, her eleven-year-old hero.
But is Hector really someone she can trust?
And can anyone protect her from the terrible secret she’s keeping?
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It was a day like any other. The sun fell across the windowsill like it had yesterday morning, like it would tomorrow. She put her palm flat on the warm ledge and looked out across the yard and down the track to where it kinked across the burn. Then she turned and slowly walked right round the room, trailing her hand on the wall like a blind person, and thinking, stupidly:
Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.
Stupid because it was just walls, a little metal fireplace, a window, an old hook on the back of the door.
‘Helen?’ Mum called from downstairs.
‘Coming.’
In the kitchen Mum was standing in the middle of the room, like a visitor.
‘Right, I think that’s everything.’
Their steps sounded too loud as they walked across the empty room, and Helen put her hand on the doorknob and opened the door and went through and out into the yard like she’d done all her life.
And now she was looking across the yard at the byre tap, set into the stone, a huge old thing, green where the copper had tarnished. She and Suzanne used to shove their fingers up it to make the water spurt out at each other. But the person doing the spurting always got just as wet as the one being spurted.
And – how daft was this? – she wanted to pull the tap off the pipe and put it in her bag.
4 out of 5 (very good)
Independent Reviewer for Archaeolibrarian - I Dig Good Books!
An intriguing read from beginning to end.
I have mixed emotions where Helen is concerned. On the one hand I feel a deep kind of sympathy for her. For the little girl that felt she had no choices and the woman who still had an innocent streak. But on the other hand.....hmm.
I was kept guessing all the way through, even the end seemed a tad mysterious to me. I'm really glad that this is the beginning of a series, it's got that certain something that has you needing to read more.
This is a rainy day read, the kind that is enhanced by the shiver greyness of rain, the chill seeping into just as the story itself seeps in and envelopes you in this world.
** same worded review will appear elsewhere **
* A copy of this book was provided to me with no requirements for a review. I voluntarily read this book, and the comments here are my honest opinion. *
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Having discovered early in her 'career' that she didn't have what it takes to be a scientist, Jane Renshaw shuffled sideways into scientific and medical editing, which has the big advantage that she can do it while watching Bargain Hunt! Jane writes what she loves to read – series of novels in which the reader can immerse herself, which let her get to know an engaging, interesting and/or terrifying cast of characters slowly, in the same way you get to know people in real life. Ideally, the drama should be played out in a gorgeous setting, and the cast should include at least one dangerously charismatic, witty, outrageous protagonist with whom the reader can fall in love. A bit of murder and mayhem in the mix never hurts either... Hence the Pitfourie Series.
Website:
https://www.janerenshaw.co.uk/
Tour hosted by: Goddess Fish Promotions
