Daisy Darker Review

I don’t tend to read a lot of crime/thriller books but for July’s general fiction bookclub we read Daisy Darker, a mystery/thriller by Alice Feeney and for once I actually filled up my bookclub journal with all the thoughts and quotes that I had liked and loved.

We start this journey with our main character Daisy Darker arriving at Seaglass the night before halloween, the home where her Nana lives, to celebrate her Nana’s eightieth birthday. For the first time in a long time, the Darker family are together in one place but this isn’t a happy reunion. Every Darker has a secret they want to keep but someone wants to change that, someone believes it is time they pay for the secrets they have kept all these years.

From page one, Alice Feeney managed to provide such an immersive atmosphere that I couldn’t help but get wrapped up into the story, constantly wanting to know each and every secret even after one had been revealed. I was thoroughly gripped from start to finish. There’s not a lot to love about the characters but to me that’s how it’s supposed to be and through the book you start to understand them more and occasionally empathise with them, though at the end of the day most of the family are just truly despicable people but it made for a truly brilliant read.

The poems included in this story definitely played a massive part of my enjoyment with the story. They were dark and haunting, completely capturing my attention with each one that I read. Only adding more to the mysterious and tense feeling of the book. As with the one other Alice Feeney book I read, I did not expect the ending at all, I was left gasping and speechless but I couldn’t think of a more fitting end for the story.

If you like dark and twisty mysteries then you definitely need to add this to your reading list! I will be recommending this one for a long time.