BOOK OF THE WEEK

Guilty by Siobhán MacDonald, Constable, £8.99

This gripping new release from Siobhán MacDonald gives an entirely new meaning to “things are not always what they seem”.

Guilty is a tale of secrets – secrets that have vast repercussions for the protagonist Luke and his family.

Luke appears to have it all – a hugely successful career as a paediatric surgeon, a glamorous politician wife and a beautiful teenage daughter. From the outside, they enjoy a middle-class lifestyle in their lovely family home – but in reality the family is falling apart.

Luke’s wife, Alison, who comes from a wealthy local family, is absorbed with herself and her career, neglecting her husband and their adopted child as a result, who avidly attempts to ruin her mother’s political ambitions.

Luke himself is seeing a therapist to try to get to the bottom of his panic attacks which are rendering him unable to carry out his job, and he is being supported by his new girlfriend Sophie.

We soon learn that Luke’s trauma stems from a catastrophic event that implicates each character within this carefully-woven tale.

The novel is split into a dual narrative as we are transported back to the past through Luke’s recollections with his therapist Terence as he tries to confront his dark past.

The opening chapters felt a little prolonged. However, the story gathers momentum when Luke begins to receive what seem like threats to the life of his daughter Nina.

The word “guilty” is scrawled on the wall of his boathouse, and subsequent sinister events force Luke to face his past and try to get to the bottom of who is plaguing his family.

With palpable tension on each page, Guilty is the perfect combination of expert storytelling and reality.

I enjoyed the protagonist Luke and the clever way in which the author presents his mental health issues which don’t spare him despite him being a rich, successful man.

I particularly enjoyed the element of local politics that runs through the narrative and it adds to the suspense, as there are a multitude of potential suspects behind the chaos.

A fresh, dynamic novel with the right amount of twists and turns to grasp the attention of the reader without venturing away from high-quality writing.