#BlogTour -‘The Greenway’ by Jane Adams

My thanks to Jill of Booksnall for having me along on the blogtour for ‘ The Greenway’ by Jane Adams’ 

This is an ebook re-release of Jane’s novel courtesy of Joffe Books and Book 1 in the Mike Croft series.

About the book…

AUGUST 1975: Cassie Maltham’s life changes forever one scorching day. She and her twelve-year-old cousin Suzie take a shortcut through the Greenway, an ancient pathway steeped in Norfolk legend. Somewhere along this path Suzie simply vanishes . . .

TWENTY YEARS LATER: Cassie is still tormented by nightmares, parts of her memory completely erased. With her husband Fergus and friends Anna and Simon, she returns to Norfolk, determined to confront her fears and solve a mystery that won’t let her rest.

Then another young girl goes missing at the entrance to the Greenway, and Cassie is pushed once more into the darkest recesses of her mind.

John Tynan, the retired detective who’d been in charge of Suzie’s case, is still haunted by her disappearance. He offers his help to Detective Inspector Mike Croft who is leading the increasingly frantic search for the missing child.

Has evil returned? And what really happened all those years ago and who can be believed?

Perfect for fans of Nualla Ellwood, Kl Slater, Gillian Flynn, and Lucy Clarke.

‘ONE OF THE MOST HAUNTING PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLERS YOU WILL READ THIS YEAR, FULL OF ASTONISHING TWISTS.’

‘The Greenway’ is a short(109 pages)novel that covers the return of Cassie and her husband Fergus to the village where she grew up. Hoping to exorcise the ghosts of her missing, never found cousin, Cassie instead finds herself in the middle of a nightmare.

Another young girl disappears in plain view of her friends and the police investigation brings the retired investigating officer,D.I Tynana, out into the new open who has documented many more child disappearances. His scrapbook of newspaper cuttings echoes that of Cassie’s mother who used it as a tool to berate Cassie and seems fundamentally responsible for her mental health issues.

The difference is that D.I Tynan thinks the missing children may have more to do with the local legends about witches who were hung on Tan’s Hill which also happens to be rumoured to be a fairy hill….

Added into the police investigation is Cassie’s husband Fergus, you aren’t quite sure whether his mild demeanor covers a dark intent!

All together I found this an engaging and intriguing novel which kept me guessing to the very end.

What I liked best about it is the mixture of folklore and police procedural which was very spare with descriptions, Jane Adams leaves a lot of room for the reader to fill in the details whilst teasing them with snippets of information about the characters.

My thanks, once more, to Jill and Joffe Books for having me on the Jane Adams ‘The Greenway’ tour!

About the author….

Why do I write?

Like most writers, it’s a kind of compulsion. The stories are there and I have to try and grab hold of them and pin them onto the page. Most of the time, I enjoy the process; sometimes, I’d rather be doing just about anything else, up to and including the ironing – and I hate ironing.

I started writing when my youngest child went to school. I was incredibly lucky and my first novel, The Greenway, was picked up by Macmillan in 1994 and published in 1995.

I currently write two series; Naomi Blake and Rina Martin. Rina was a character I’d had in mind for years before committing her to paper. An elderly, ex thespian who had played the part of a popular TV detective, she had retired to the seaside and bought a boarding house for other ex performers. Rina’s feisty, no nonsense character is, I suppose, based on the rather powerful and opinionated ladies I grew up surrounded by – mother, teachers in the all girls school I attended, aunts and pseudo aunts, all of whom had opinions about everything and made sure these were unstintingly shared.

Naomi Blake, on the other hand, was the brainchild of my late agent, Bob Tanner at International Scripts. ‘You should write a blind detective,’ he said ‘ and she needs a big, black guidedog, called Napoleon’.

I thought it was a daft idea, and told him so. I just couldn’t see how to do it. But, like a lot of seemingly daft ideas, this one wormed its was into my brain and I realised he was right. It could work and so, the Naomi Blake series came into being.

I have always written in other genres too, short stories in the SF, Fantasy and Gothic Horror genre, and am working on longer projects when time allows. I also teach Creative Writing and have had the great priviligde of being a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at three different universities.

Links-The Greenway ebook

http://janeadams.wix.com/writer

Twitter @books_n_all