Publishing Deal - Andrea Gillies

I'm very pleased to read in today's Publishers Lunch Weekly that a US deal has been made for Andrea Gillies' The White Lie, which I reviewed recently. It's rather a long wait though! The UK (mass) market paperback is out on 5 July.

Andrea Gillies's THE WHITE LIE, in which a man haunts the woods near his family's crumbling estate in the Scottish highlands and unwinds the complicated, contradictory tale of the secrets they have kept and lies they have told to protect their legacy, to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, for publication in Spring 2014.

New Reviews: Bass, Bates, Casey, Dean, Gillies, Hauxwell, Henry, Orford, Staincliffe

There were no reviews last weekend as I was away at CrimeFest and I've written up a few of the panels here.

Don't forget to vote in the International Dagger Polls.

Here are this week's 9 new reviews:

Amanda Gillies reviews Jefferson Bass's, The Bones of Avignon, published in the US as The Inquisitor's Key;

Maxine Clarke reviews Quentin Bates's Cold Comfort the second in his Icelandic series;

Michelle Peckham reviews Jane Casey's The Last Girl the third in the DC Maeve Kerrigan series;

Terry Halligan is very impressed with Jason Dean's debut The Wrong Man set in the US;

I recently reviewed, on the blog, Andrea Gillies's, The White Lie a tale of family secrets, set in Scotland;

Susan Hilary reviews Annie Hauxwell's debut In Her Blood;

Susan White reviews James Henry's Fatal Frost the second prequel to R D Wingfield's beloved series;

Lynn Harvey reviews Margie Orford's, Daddy's Girl, the third in her Cape Town series which has just been released in paperback

and Rich Westwood reviews Cath Staincliffe's prequel to the Scott & Bailey tv series, Dead to Me and he hopes there will be more.

Previous reviews can be found in the review archive.

Forthcoming titles can be found by author or date or by category, here along with releases by year.

Review: The White Lie by Andrea Gillies

The White Lie by Andrea Gillies, Short Books Ltd, February 2012, ISBN: 1780720394

Andrea Gillies is the author of the non-fiction book KEEPER which won the Orwell Prize 2012 and she now turns her hand to fiction with possibly award-winning results with the labyrinthine THE WHITE LIE.

The book opens:

2008

“My name is Michael Salter, and I am dead; dead, that much I know for sure.”

Michael is the reader's guide and interpretor as he takes us from the present, to further in the past and even further back again. All the events occur at Peattie, an old country estate adjacent to a loch. The plot is quite simple: fourteen years previously, nineteen-year-old Michael disappears in the loch while out with a family member, supposedly drowned; no body is found so the family cover it up and say that he has gone away, left them for a new life down south. There are rumours in the village that he's committed suicide but the Salters say no more about it to anyone outside the family, and little to insiders. However the family dynamics are completely changed and the repercussions extend further and further as the family expands. Finally a birthday party brings things to a head, everyone's talking about Michael, and eventually the truth is revealed to the reader.

Put quite so baldy it seems unlikely to be a gripping read and yet THE WHITE LIE is fascinating and puzzling and even when you think you know what happened at the loch somebody else says they were lying and you're no further forward. Indeed as Hugh Laurie's Dr House says “Everybody lies” - though to be fair they may not know that they are lying.

Beautifully written and replete with mysteries and family secrets I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's one that requires concentration, as at first I did have to keep referring to the family tree at the front to keep the large cast straight. The setting is convincingly brought to life and you really feel present in that house and at the family meetings and when you do get to the resolution you'll want to go back to the beginning and reread to see if you can pick up more clues second time around.

This may only be a crime novel in the tangential way that Catherine O'Flynn's WHAT WAS LOST is but I'd recommend it to both genre and non-genre fans alike.