The Skeleton Key: A family reunion ends in murder; the Sunday Times top ten bestseller

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MY THOUGHTS: I became fully immersed in the story of the Churcher and Lally families to the detriment of everything else I was currently reading. The extended family dynamics enthralled me. I became obsessed by their machinations, and their relationships, which are almost incestuous. I thought this was going to be a straight forward treasure hunt but I may have underestimated Ms Kelly as this is so much more than that. We see how people become so obsessed with the search for clues and the harrassment the author and their family go through. The obsession of some of the readers was just mindblowing.

We see this family through Nell’s adult eyes as she observes these people she knows, loves and even sometimes hates through a perspective that is not exactly that of an outsider but still has more than a bit of distance. They may not recognize that the family is not healthy, but she knows that living in their midst is not healthy for her and never has been. That her parents named her after the dead woman in their famous story and never even thought that it might inspire the crazies is just the tip of a very ugly iceberg of parents behaving very badly indeed. The mystery of the missing golden bone is really secondary, and to be honest, for most of the book I wasn’t at all interested in its whereabouts. Even though the obsession with it runs like a thread through this story. However, this is definitely a character-driven novel with a focus on the many, mostly bad, decisions these characters have made throughout the years. Unfortunately for me, I found most of it a struggle. I didn’t particularly like the characters. I often couldn’t understand their behaviour or motivations, both in the past and present. They seemed to knowingly and stubbornly remain part of dysfunctional families and extremely toxic relationships for reasons that made no sense to me. It made me quite sad to realise their lives could have been so much different if they’d been in any way smart/brave/something enough to step away from the one they were living.

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Moody, propulsive, and one of the most intriguing set ups I’ve read in years. Erin Kelly doesn’t put a foot wrong in this atmospheric, original thriller’ GILLIAN McALLISTER

Real insomnia is not just brought on by stress or alcohol abuse, says Darrieussecq. When sleepers complain that they haven’t slept all night, insomniacs feel like replying “that they haven’t slept all their life”. Darrieussecq hasn’t been able to sleep properly since she had her three children, more than twenty years ago. Since then she has tried many so-called cures – from counting sheep to a fasting cure in an old monastery – which she describes with a mixture of humour and resignation. The only thing that really works for her are sleeping pills. Now that very dysfunctional family: the adulterer Frank, very narcissistic Cora, their next door neighbors/ long time friends/ also in laws ( their children were married with each other) and their children, grandchildren gather all together at family estate where the documentary crew filming their entire celebration. Frank and Cora’s son Dom is about to lunch the application of treasure hunt he’s been working during pandemic ( it nearly took 3 years of work) And Frank plans to reveal the whereabouts of the missing golden bone! Erin Kelly’s He Said/She Said was one of the first thriller ARCs I received. I devoured that book, and I’ll never forget it. Ever since, I try to catch all her new releases, so of course I was excited to add The Skeleton Key to my TBR. Anyway, all this has started up again as they've decided to make an app and create another treasure hunt, but on the date of the release, a real bone is found in the place that they've hidden the last golden bone from the previous skeleton (a pelvis). This digs up the past for Nell in a very unpleasant way, which also happens to threaten the safety of her foster child. Also complicating things are the many, many characters in Nell's family, all of whom cause a lot of drama, especially her parents and their "best friends" who live next door to them. Her parents' past histories and all of their drama is a significant part of the story. The relationship between Nell and Dom and that of Billie and Nell are the highlights of the story, in fact, the arc of each and every character in the book was brilliantly done. Billie, however, is like a breath of fresh air in this dark family drama. It is not just about the mystery of a skeleton but Erin Kelly keeps the readers on their toes convoluting the plot with one reveal after another every step of the way and there are so many subplots running in the story that the momentum of the story also has its own pace, whereas some parts I could literally fly with it there were also some other parts which were very slow in its unraveling.

Skeleton Keys and Literary treasure hunts

In the late 18th century, Joseph Johnson was arguably the first modern publisher, working with some of the most famous names of the day: William Blake was his chief engraver. Johnson also enjoyed profound personal relationships with some of his authors, most notably Mary Wollstonecraft and Swiss artist Henry Fuseli. Hay’s meticulously researched biography, rich in period and personal detail, sheds light on both Johnson the man and the vibrant cultural world he inhabited. Erin Kelly’s latest is an absorbing treasure-hunt mystery that’s also a murder story, a family saga, and also significantly about ageing, particularly how it affects men and women differently. Nell is the semi-estranged daughter of artist Frank Churcher, whose masterpiece The Golden Bones – a picture book containing clues to the location of, yes, bones made of solid gold – became a worldwide phenomenon in the 1970s. Now, on the 50th anniversary of its publication, a revival is planned, but the ‘big reveal’ goes drastically wrong and soon the entire Churcher family is embroiled in a murder investigation. The Skeleton Key is a sprawling story with subplots galore and a smart perspective switch somewhere in the middle. With so much happening, it doesn’t quite keep the same momentum throughout (I found a few of the aforementioned subplots a bit tiresome, and found myself furiously disagreeing with Nell’s moral standpoint towards the end!), but it’s good at being a story about a lot of things. For me it was most effective in its portrayal of a monstrous, powerful figure casting a shadow across far too many people; I suspect it’s one of those books in which different readers will find different meanings. Scary, eerie, moving and compelling: a beautifully-plotted, gorgeously-written triumph of a thriller’

Broadchurch: The Novel (August 2014) inspired by the first season of 2013's mega-hit ITV series Broadchurch Nomad Century is the much-anticipated follow-up to Vince’s award-winning book, Adventures in the Anthropocene, which explained how human impacts on Earth have created a new geological epoch. In this new work, the author makes the pessimistic, but entirely plausible, assumption that by the end of this century the Earth will be 4C warmer than during the period before industrialisation. And while this may sound like the stuff of nightmares, she also offers an optimistic vision of how humans might cope after rendering large swathes of the globe uninhabitable – through massive migration towards the poles.Once again, Erin Kelly has delivered a nailbiting mystery with characters that truly shine. It’s the perfect ratio of character to plot for this genre, in my opinion. As with her other novels, the writing plunges you deep into the story and never lets go. I never knew what to expect, which is exactly how I like my thrillers. For Darrieussecq, Kafka is the “patron saint of insomnia” and his claustrophobic waking nightmares communicate the horror of lying awake at 4 am every night, your mind teeming with thoughts and words, while others sleep. Indeed Kafka blamed his writing – “the imminent possibility of great moments which would tear me open” – for his sleeplessness. A solid winner from Erin Kelly, The Skeleton Key is a perfect choice for all fans of the family saga with a mystery woven thru it. Erin Kelly writes at the start of the book of her inspiration for the novel and that really got me interested. No spoilers here but it’s a great idea and one I thought she wrote about brilliantly.

Finally, the social media feeds that intersperse the narrative are acutely observed with comments that come from the land of the utterly ridiculous and your question where brains are! They really add an extra dimension to the situations that unfold. I found it slow,boring and predictable The "book quest" feels like just a prop for what is essentially the story of two-not really interesting- dysfunctional families. Characters,for all the drama,felt flat for me.

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Now the book is being republished….with extra clues as to the final set of bones…. BookTrail Travel to the locations in The Skeleton Key While the mystery is great, it's the characters that make this book. Actions that start out with good intentions become derailed and disastrous making it an unpredictable and rewarding read. The story inside is every bit as stunning, intricate and enticing as the cover art. Scary, moving and compelling: a beautifully-plotted, gorgeously-written triumph of a thriller’ NICCI FRENCH If Agatha Christie remains elusive, it’s not for the want of those trying to find her. Janet Morgan’s official biography of 1984 and Laura Thompson’s equally detailed but ultimately more impressionistic portrait of 2007 have both been updated and reissued; and there are numerous other analyses that try to understand how the woman who routinely described herself as a housewife became Britain’s bestselling novelist of all time. Enter historian Lucy Worsley, whose declared intention is to rescue Christie, who died in 1976 at the age of 85, from the misperceptions that cling to her life and her works of fiction. Escape Rating A: It’s all too easy to comprehend the obsessions of the ‘Bonehunters’ while reading The Skeleton Key, because the complex, twisted nature of the puzzle – and the people at its heart – sinks its teeth into the reader and does not let go until the end.