Claire Allan

I dived into this a bit blind. I skimmed the blurb and thought, well, it's on my Kindle, it must have caught my attention for some reason, so here goes. No more than a couple of pages in, and I was hooked. This falls easily into the page-turner category.

Emily witnesses a tragic hit and run. Emily is a fragile person with a troubled past and finds herself fascinated by Rose's, the victim's, life. It's there for the world to see on her Facebook page. It's the perfect, idyllic life, and she was the perfect, idyllic wife and mother, virtually beatified by her husband and all who knew her. Especially her husband. Emily's life was a bit of a train wreck, so…what if she stepped into Saint Rose's shoes? But no one really knows what goes on behind a stage of perfection.

This rolls along at a consistently good pace, it's tense, suspenseful and keeps you guessing. You find yourself pointing at one character, and then no, that 's a a red herring, it must the other one…or is it?! Very skilfully written, with depth and feeling.

Compelling, thrilling and emotionally charged. I was totally addicted, and I'm certainly going to read more by this author.

The only reason I haven't given this five stars is because there were one too many grammatical blunders: and I'll never let off a 'was sat' lightly. Really does make my nose twitch.
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Ingrid Devlin remembers it well, that night 25 years ago when 8 year old Kelly Doherty went missing and was later found murdered. Now Ingrid is a journalist at The Chronicle in Derry and is tasked with writing an anniversary piece for the paper. However, a bit of digging makes her start to question everything she thought she knew about the case and puts her back in touch with people from her childhood who are connected with it.

I always enjoy a Claire Allan book and Ask No Questions is no exception. It's a gripping crime/psychological thriller which kept me guessing as much as it did Ingrid. I found it so intriguing to see how she, along with others who were children at the time, started to question their childhood memories. I'm sure we've all looked back on incidents from our childhood and realised that what we thought they meant wasn't quite accurate.

Ingrid is quite a character. She's a tenacious journalist, one who tries to keep her morals but doesn't always manage to do so in pursuit of a good story. I thought she was brave bordering on foolish most of the time but she's an excellent protagonist and one I'd love to see again in a future book. The majority of the story is told by Ingrid but there are some chapters about Declan, one of her childhood contemporaries and someone very close to the case. This narrative sharing worked really well to tell the story of then and now.

I found Ask No Questions to have quite an ominous feel to it and the author did a fantastic job at ramping up the tension and the unease. I particularly liked following Ingrid's investigations and how she went about digging into Kelly's death, and I really enjoyed the many twists and turns to the story before it reached its conclusion.… (mehr)