Lies At Her Door, A A Abbott (Perfect City Press, 2022)

Lies at Her Door is a psychological thriller set in one of the more affluent parts of affluent Clifton in Bristol. As a Bristolian, I enjoyed the setting and recognising places familiar to me – though it can feel a bit disconcerting to picture murky deeds and doings going on in them! Still, murky deeds and doings can take place anywhere, as thrillers like this suggest.

Lucy Freeman is in her thirties and after a lifetime of put-downs from her fashion-model-thin and impeccably dressed mother is low on self-esteem. She’s always been unfavourably compared to her rock-star brother who is handsome, glamourous, rich and self-centred. Now her mother is disabled by Parkinson’s, Lucy has to stay at home to look after her, which she does lovingly and conscientiously. Her father, a university lecturer, isn’t much help, and does little to support his daughter. Lucy’s life is about as bleak as it can be.

Something needs to change. Unfortunately, change is often not for the better and things get much worse for Lucy when a skeleton is discovered and she is suspected of murder. The mystery opens in great style: the remains are exposed in front of a crowd when a sink hole appears during a Christmas carol concert in the communal garden near the Freemans’ house. It seems far fetched, but in fact the sink hole is based on a real event, with a few exciting fictional embellishments of course.

The story is cleverly told from two points of view, Lucy and Neil, the detective who is convinced of her guilt. The characters are all well drawn, and I especially liked the neighbours and the sense of a small community or enclave which intensifies the narrowness of Lucy’s life. The mystery unfolds in a very satisfying way, and there’s also a bit of match-making along the way to add to the interest.

One aspect that did interest me was the way that Lucy uses comfort eating as a way of coping with her problems. I found some of her recipes particularly unappetising – the squares of chocolate sandwiched between buttered toast for instance. Like so many women, she has been made to feel ashamed of her body, and so feeding that body has become a shameful act. Hence, she hides bars of chocolate – they are “clandestine” – and when she eats, she feels guilty. It’s a predicament too many girls and women find themselves in and I thought the author handled it sensitively. The truth is that the eating is not the problem, it’s how Lucy has been made to feel about herself. Unless she starts to have self-belief she will probably never have a healthy relationship with food.

So do things improve for Lucy? I hoped they would! By the end of the book there have certainly been many changes, but whether for better or worse I’ll leave you to read for yourself. I will say that the ending of this page-turning thriller does not disappoint!

'We will have a fire': arson during eighteenth-century enclosures

Join our Winter Solstice Blog Hop! Thirty writers throw light on a dazzling range of topics . Follow the links at the end of this article to be enlightened and brightened by our blogs... “Inclosure came and trampled on the grave Of labours rights and left the poor a slave And memorys pride ere want to wealth did bow Is both the shadow and the substance now.” John Clare, The Mores On 1 May 1794, the writer Hester (Thrale) Piozzi of Streatham Park recorded in her diary that the furze on the common had been set on fire in protest at the enclosure of land “which really & of just Right belonged to the poor of the Parish”. Yet even while she acknowledged that the protesters had justice on their side, she criticised them for not “going to Law like wise fellows” and concluded: “So senseless are Le Peuple , & so unfitted to be souverain”. The senseless poor of Streatham were not unique. During the eighteenth centu...

My blog has moved to https://lucienneboyce.com/blog/

My blog has moved to my new website and is now at https://lucienneboyce.com/blog/ I'm no longer posting blogs on this site, but you can still read the old blogs on this site, or you can find them at the new location.

From Hogarth to Rowlandson: Medicine in Art in Eighteenth Century Britain, Fiona Haslam, (Liverpool University Press, 1996)

I’m often asked about how I go about doing the research for my historical novels. One of the sources I usually mention is visual art. I’ve always found that looking at contemporary paintings, prints, sketches, sculpture and so on reveals a wealth of information about how people of the past lived – what they wore, what sort of houses they lived in, how they spent their time, the towns and villages they inhabited. Going to an art gallery is one of my favourite research trips – especially if there’s a decent café with tea and cake at the end of an afternoon’s study! Of course, you don’t always have to take artistic representations literally. It’s obvious that whatever you’re looking at is an interpretation of the reality: it’s how the artist saw it. In fact, this subjectivity can be a real advantage if you’re looking for ideas about how people lived and thought. Often the most exaggerated representations, such as satirical prints or caricature, are the most revealing, telling us thi...

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