#BlogTour-‘Call Me Star Girl’ by Louise Beech

My sincere thanks to Anne Cater and Orenda Books  for having me on the blogtour for one of my favourite authors, Louise Beech! I am jumping besides myself in excitement!
About the book…

Tonight is the night for secrets…
Pregnant Victoria Valbon was brutally murdered in an alley three weeks ago –and her killer hasn’t been caught.
Tonight is Stella McKeever’s final radio show. The theme is secrets. You tell her yours, and she’ll share some of hers.
Stella might tell you about Tom, a boyfriend who likes to play games, about the mother who abandoned her, now back after twelve years. She might tell you about the perfume bottle with the star-shaped stopper, or about her father …
What Stella really wants to know is more about the mysterious man calling the station … who says he knows who killed Victoria, and has proof.
Tonight is the night for secrets, and Stella wants to know everything…
With echoes of the chilling Play Misty for Me, Call Me Star Girl is a taut, emotive and all-consuming psychological thriller that plays on our deepest fears, providing a stark reminder that stirring up dark secrets from the past can be deadly…

Reader, I am dead.

And the culprit is Louise Beech, there could not be a nicer way to go.

Distraught, bedraggled and hungover from reading this incredible Russian doll of a novel, Louise’s first thriller. You would be forgiven for thinking she does this all the time, so immaculately is it plotted.

There is the baby inside the woman left in an alleyway who gets hidden inside a hashtag. There is the abandoned girl inside the woman who hides behind a voice in her radio studio. There is the mother inside the woman who chose to abandon her daughter rather than share her father’s love, who becomes the mother she should have been,far too late,and to other women’s daughters.

And tying them all together is the one night, the one moment, when Stella, literally born a stargirl, has her final radio show.

Everything about Stella has been so well wrought-you wince as her mother tells her that she only recently found that the word stella related to stars, you hold your breath as she allows her boyfriend to do things that most people would find disturbing because she is so surethat  they are soulmates.

You note every single song that Stella plays, and just how vulnerable she is due to the lies and deceipts of others. And you long to tell her how she is so worthy of love, and understand how she reaches for the stars, they are a constant motif with her because they are always there, it takes the night time sky to make them really shine.

Abandoned by her mother, never knowing who her father is, Stella lives the lives of others through her radio show. But this last night, the shocks and the secrets come pouring out of a Pandora’s Box of half truths and lies leaving her, and us, the reader, reeling.

Her mother,Elizabeth,randomly reappears in her life, her boyfriend,Tom,is acting very strangely and her radio show is the only constant in her life-so why is Stella leaving the station?

In the midst of a murder investiagtion in the death of pregnant Victoria Valbon, all of these characters have motives and involvement which gradually clarifies over the course of the novel.

The scenes where she is alone in the radio station , waiting for her stalker The Man Who Knows,to ring in and stop taunting her by claiming he saw Victoria’s death are taut with suspense and brilliantly rendered-you hold your breath wondering who could be in an apparently empty building.

There are lovely Easter eggs for anyone who has read Louise’s other novels (if you haven’t, honestly I cannot recommend them enough,they are available via the Orenda website or as Audible exclusive audiobooks).

It’s a mystery with such heart, it’s breathtaking the way that Louise creates a relationship with the reader so you are happy to let her take you to some dark, dark places and then rise up to the stars.

‘Call Me Stargirl’ is her best novel yet, and that is saying something!

My words are completely inadequate compared to the eloquent and insightful reviews which have accompanied this blogtour so far-I just want to say,’Buy the book, you will not be disappointed’.

I leave the last words to Stella-

‘I laugh instead.’Sounds like one of those novels that has ‘girl’ or ‘wife’ or ‘sister’ in the title,’I said.’We just need a killer twist and a cliffhanger ending, and we could have a bestseller called ‘Stargirl’.’

If there is any justice this will be a stellar bestseller!!

About the author…

Louise Beech is an exceptional literary talent, whose debut novel ‘‘How To Be Brave’‘ was a Guardian Readers’ Choice for 2015. The follow-up, ‘‘The Mountain In My Shoe’‘ was shortlisted for Not the Booker Prize. Both of her
previous books ‘‘Maria In The Moon’‘ and ‘‘The Lion Tamer Who Lost’‘ were widely reviewed, critically acclaimed and number-one bestsellers on Kindle.

‘The Lion Tamer Who Lost’ was shortlisted for the RNA Most
Popular Romantic Novel Award in 2019. Her short fiction has won the Glass Woman Prize, the Eric Hoffer Award for Prose, and the Aesthetica Creative Works competition, as well as shortlisting for the Bridport Prize twice.

Louise lives with her husband on the outskirts of Hull, and loves her job as a Front of House Usher at Hull Truck Theatre, where her first play was performed in 2012.

Links-https://louisebeech.co.uk/

http://orendabooks.co.uk/

Twitter @LouiseWriter

             @OrendaBooks

             @annecater