The Blurb
For Sara Keane, it was supposed to be a second chance. A new country. A new house. A new beginning with her husband Damien.
Then came the knock on the door.
Elderly Mary Jackson can't understand why Sara and her husband are living in her home. She remembers the fire, and the house burning down. But she also remembers the children. The children who need her, whom she must protect.
'The children will find you,' she tells Sara, because Mary knows she needs help too. Sara soon becomes obsessed with what happened in that house nearly sixty years ago - the tragic, bloody night her husband never intended for her to discover. And Mary - silent for six decades - is finally ready to tell her story . . .
The House of Ashes is the stunning new 2022 thriller from the award-winning master of the genre, Stuart Neville - perfect for fans of John Connolly, Alex North and Brian McGilloway.
Sara's father-in-law has gifted her and husband Damien a house in Morganstown, Northern Ireland. He's even done it up for them. It's supposed to be a fresh start in a new town in Damien's homeland after Sara's breakdown. But a few days after moving in an elderly, bewildered woman arrives, freezing cold with bleeding feet, confused why someone is in her house and worried about the children. Before Sara can find out who she is or what children she's referring to, Damien bundles the woman in the car and drives away. This one event stirs something in Sara and as she seeks to find the truth about terrible events in the house sixty years earlier she finds a strength she didn't know she had.
I found it easy to empathise with Sara. It becomes evident to the reader pretty quickly that Damien is controlling and a bit of a bully. Sara knows it inside but doesn't want to admit it to herself or others. It was impossible not to feel for her, uprooted from the city she knew and all her friends and put down in a place where she knows nobody. She already feels like there is something odd about the house when Mary turns up that morning. And when it becomes clear that Damien might know more than he's let on, it lights a fire of determination in her.
Mary. Oh, Mary. I don't have the right words for her, to do her character justice. She is exquisitely written. The majority of the book is told from the viewpoints of Sara and Mary, and in Mary's chapters we slowly learn of her early life in the very house in which Sara now lives. I loved that these chapters, essentially narrated by Mary, are told using local dialectal words and phrases, it really adds to the authenticity of it all. I don't want to say to much about her story so that you can discover it yourselves, but it's horrific. It wasn't what I was expecting but I couldn't turn the pages fast enough and my heart went out to Mary, and others.
The story is told in a dual timeline, Sara in the present day, Mary sixty years ago, and the two women share both a vulnerability, and an inner strength, even if Sara is only just finding hers. And it is Mary who helps her to do that. But they are also linked by the things they've seen, the things no one else has. Shadows against the walls, movements in the corner of the eye...
As much of the action takes place in the house and its environs, this novel has a very claustrophobic atmosphere to it, totally fitting for the subject matter. The scene setting is perfect, with the rooms in the house easy to picture. The chapters are short, helping an already pacy story zip along. I read it over two days - if I could've done it in one, I would have!
In The House of Ashes Stuart Neville has delivered a tense, chilling, fast moving story of the secrets of one house and the repercussions six decades later. It is a tale of abuse and coercive control and won't be for everyone. But it's beautifully written and sensitively handled. This is the story of two women, two beautiful, strong women, and I love that. It's dark, troubling and uncomfortable to read in places but you will also find yourselves cheering for these women. In fact, you'll go through pretty much every emotion reading this - I was so angry for much o f it! On the strength of this, I can't wait to read my next Neville book - absolutely loved it! Highly recommended.
Oh, and I promise you, you will be thinking about the children long after the end of the book...
The Author
Stuart Neville's debut novel, The Twelve (published in the USA as The Ghosts of Belfast), won the Mystery/Thriller category of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was picked as one of the top crime novels of 2009 by both the New York Times and the LA Times. He has been shortlisted for various awards, including the Barry, Macavity, Dilys awards, as well as the Irish Book Awards Crime Novel of the Year. He has since published three critically acclaimed sequels, Collusion, Stolen Souls and The Final Silence.
His first four novels have each been longlisted for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, and Ratlines was shortlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger.
Stuart's novels have been translated into various languages, including German, Japanese, Polish, Swedish, Greek and more. The French edition of The Ghosts of Belfast, Les Fantômes de Belfast, won Le Prix Mystère de la Critique du Meilleur Roman Étranger and Grand Prix du Roman Noir Étranger.
His fourth novel, Ratlines, about Nazis harboured by the Irish state following WWII is currently in development for television.
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