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In the vein of Fiona Barton's The Widow and Renée Knight's Disclaimer, a psychological thriller about a war reporter who returns to her childhood home after her mother's death but becomes convinced that all is not well in the house next door--but is what she's seeing real or a symptom of the trauma she suffered in Syria?The One Person You Should Trust Is Lying to You.Kate has spent fifteen years bringing global injustice home: as a decorated war reporter, she's always in a place of conflict, writing about ordinary people in unimaginable situations. When her mother dies, Kate returns home from Syria for the funeral. But an incident with a young Syrian boy haunts her dreams, and when Kate sees a boy in the garden of the house next door--a house inhabited by an Iraqi refugee who claims her husband is away and she has no children--Kate becomes convinced that something is very wrong. As she struggles to separate her memories of Syria from the quiet town in which she grew up--and also to reconcile her memories of a traumatic childhood with her sister's insistence that all was not as Kate remembers--she begins to wonder what is actually true...and what is just in her mind.In this gripping, timely debut, Nuala Ellwood brings us an unforgettable damaged character, a haunting , humanizing look at the Syrian conflict, and a deeply harrowing psychological thriller that readers won't be able to put down.
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More twists than an ice cream cone! Kate's work as a journalist takes her all over the world. She has been exposed to several situations that would break a weaker person, but Kate is tough. It is not until she gets personally involved with a family that she feels her world begin to crumble. With the death of a young boy, he begins to haunt her dreams. But he is not the only one. There are others, and the voices are not always quiet. She takes medicines to help her sleep, but they do not always work. When her mother dies, she returns home, but the voices return with her, and the cracks are beginning to show.Kate's family is dysfunctional to the max. Her father was an alcoholic and abusive toward her and her mother. Her brother drowned when he was three, which caused a bigger rift in the family. Now that they are grown and their father is dead, her sister Sally has turned to alcohol to cope. Paul, her brother in law does his best to keep the family together, but even Sally's daughter Hannah has escaped her mother's wrath and run off. No one has heard from her in quite some time. Kate wants to see where her mother is buried, and Paul is more than willing to drive her around, to the lawyers and the graveyard. But when a young boy begins to appear in the garden at night, Kate is sure that she is not seeing things, but no one believes her. She does her best to find out what is going on, but the woman next door insists that there is no little boy living there. Kate knows what she has seen, but the police find no trace of a young boy anywhere. When she is arrested for assaulting the neighbor, Kate must undergo an evaluation to see if she must be kept for further treatment, or if she will be allowed to leave the center. She can be held for 72 hours while the doctor asks her all sorts of questions and drags her back to situations that she does not want to revisit. But when she is released and allowed to return to work, she escapes back to Syria determined to lose herself in her work and get her life back on track. Sally however, angry that Kate, perfect Kate, is fixing to leave again turns on her sister. The sisters have not been close for quite some time, but Kate reaches out to her, something that Sally does not remember since she was drunk again, but Kate is desperate to find out what is going on with the young boy next door. When a bomb hits the camp that she is staying in, she is feared dead, but Sally refuses to believe that Kate is gone. She holds onto the hope that she is missing and will resurface soon. When she gets a visit from their mother's neighbor, begging for help, Sally refuses to listen to her and turns her out. But after Paul leaves, and she listens to the dicta-phone that belongs to her sister she decides to pay the neighbor a visit to see what she wanted and see if she can get to the bottom of the mystery that Kate was concerned about when she left. But when she arrives she finds Fida at the bottom of the stairs bleeding, and a shock that no one could see coming that awaits her in the shed in the backyard....Follow the story of Kate and Sally - the twists and the turns - as these sisters learn the meaning of family and in the end, solve a mystery that will leave the countryside shaking their heads over the fact that this could happen under their noses with no one being the wiser..This was a book that was well worth reading! I was hooked from the beginning! There were several scenes that were rather hard to read through, but they drew the story together. The tapestry that is woven, through the eyes of the sisters is expertly done. This book will leave you wanting to know more at the end! Head over to the library and grab your copy today