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. What drew me in to The Skeleton Key were a) the cover of the book, which seemed to promise both magic and ordinary life and b) the fact that it was built around a book. In this case, a treasure hunt book that's now 50 years old, involves a quest to re-assemble a skeleton, has a world-wide, obsessive fan base, and has shaped the lives of two close families—one the author/illustrator's, the other his best friend's. Those revelations and the events that precede them will melt the thin ice of Nell’s precarious safety. She’s never really been safe. She just didn’t know how unstable the web of lies that kept her family afloat truly was. The Skeleton Key has a unique plot, keeping aside the central theme of dysfunctional families, the story has an author whose picture book The Golden Bones has clues for a real treasure hunt and the frenzy the release of the book creates for him and his family. Being named after the central character in a fictional book written by your father has not given Eleanor Churcher an easy life. Stalked, stabbed and threatened by the crazy treasure hunters called Bonehunters, Nell stays away from her family as much as possible to escape the madness that has the bone hunters making her life a miserable hell.

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.

Quinn’s decision to portray early 20th-century society as progressive and liberal-minded means that homophobia and class prejudice are never articulated. This gives the book a cosy, teatime feeling: delightful to indulge in, but denying us the thrill of fear that comes when characters are really up against it. It’s only when those reliable baddies the Nazis come into play that the adrenaline flows. The book was a sensation. A community of treasure hunters called the Bonehunters formed, in frenzied competition, obsessed to a dangerous, murderous degree. The book made Frank a rich man. Stalked by fans who could not tell fantasy from reality, his daughter, Nell, became a recluse. 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. Whilst the story started out revolving around Frank Churcher’s famous book The Golden Bones, which has led to his fame and wealth but also to the formation of a worldwide fan base of “bone hunters” who have put his own daughter at risk (you will have to read it to find out why), it soon became more character driven, exploring the intertwined relationships of the Churcher and Lally families. As dark secrets were revealed, and family dynamics became more and more dysfunctional, my fascination with these characters made me loath to put the book down. There were quite a few “aha!” moments when pieces of the puzzle fell into place and revealed cleverly plotted twists. Kelly is a talented writer who not only knows how to utterly enthral her readers, but also to weave magic into the multiple threads that form her stories. Richard and Judy Introduce He Said She Said by Erin Kelly". WHSmith Blog. 5 April 2018 . Retrieved 8 October 2020.

Since finishing this book I've been thinking how to voice my admiration for the author. I don't like rehashing the story because that's what blurbs are for, but I really do want to write down how this book made me feel after finishing it. The book was a sensation. A community of treasure hunters called the Bonehunters formed, in frenzied competition, obsessed to a dangerous degree. People sold their homes to travel to England and search for Elinore. Marriages broke down as the quest consumed people. A man died. The book made Frank a rich man. His daughter, Nell, became a recluse. This is not just a literary treasure hunt when a book is published and people look for clues in locations around the country. It’s also a book about a very dysfunction family and one about power and obsession. My favorite part of this book was the whole idea of the hunt. I actually wished there was more about the actual hunt itself.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. The story of the Churcher and Lally families is one I will remember for a long time. The layering of details was flawless. There was so much to absorb. The Skeleton Key is a deliciously slower-building story that takes its time in its richness. I absolutely adored it and highly recommend it to longer-book-patient readers who are looking for a simmering, bold, fresh thriller.

Gaia Vince’s new book should be read not just by every politician, but by every person on the planet, because it lays out, much more clearly than any existing scientific assessment, the world we are creating through global heating. Because, as we see the incidents in the past that brought them all to this mixed-up present, the center point of the family is Frank Churcher and his ego – and he’s never cared or taken care of anyone but himself. Everyone else just enables him and lives off the proceeds – whether they see it or not.Splendidly translated by Penny Hueston, this is a brilliantly creative and playful meditation on the disturbing reality of insomnia, one that weaves together Darrieussecq’s own experiences with quotations, images and biographical anecdotes from other sleep-deprived writers.

Broadchurch: The Novel (August 2014) inspired by the first season of 2013's mega-hit ITV series Broadchurch And as I said above, the family is messy. Messy and toxic and precious and pretentious and each and every one of them needed to go. In a large house in London, two families meet. One person among them is excited about the revelation he is about to make. The others dread what will happen next. The plot of this one is pretty complicated (one of my complaints), but the basic premise is that there is a children's book (based on a real book the author loves as a child) that left clues for readers to find treasure in real life (in this case a tiny golden skeleton split up into sections), and people became obsessed with it, making its author and illustrator a very rich man. It also painted a target on his daughter, who he named after the character in the book whose skeleton all the treasure hunters were looking to find. A large part of this book is Eleanor (who goes by Nell) dealing with the fallout from obsessive unhealthy fandom.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. Erin Kelly is an author who always keeps you guessing. No novel of hers is anything like any other novel of hers, so you never quite know what you’re going to get. This is why I have a rather complicated relationship with her work, I think. I will adore one book, and feel rather meh about another one. ‘The Skeleton Key‘ lands somewhere in between the two for me. 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. Incredibly compelling family-secrets story, with the premise of a book like Masquerade by Kit Williams that made it's creator's family rich, and also targets.