#BlogTour ‘Shadow Of A Doubt’ by Michelle Davies

About the book…

Twenty-six years ago my brother was murdered in my family home.

I was sent to a psychiatric unit for killing him.

The truth is, I didn’t do it.

The whole world believed eight-year-old Cara killed her younger brother on that fateful night. But she blamed it on a paranormal entity she swears was haunting her house. No one believed her and after two years of treatment in a psychiatric unit for delusional disorder, Cara was shunned by her remaining family and put into foster care.

Now she’s being forced to return to the family home for the first time since her brother’s death, but what if she’s about to re-discover the evil that was lurking inside its walls?

‘Pure suspense, where past and present collide with chilling results. On every page, there’s a sense that anything could happen.’ Erin Kelly

‘Suspenseful, chilling, with an underlying story that’s tragic on many levels. Shadow Of A Doubt is an expertly crafted psychological thriller which grips from page one. Loved it.’ Amanda Jennings

Many thanks to the awesome Alainna Georgiou from Orion for inviting me on the blog tour for ‘Shadow Of A Doubt’, the debut domestic noir novel by Michelle Davies which is out now in ebook format!

I honestly thought I was reading a horror novel, from the gripping and frightening opener to the very last page, Limey Stan became something that haunts not just Cara, but also the reader.

After being found responsible for the death of her 6 year old brother, Cara was first sent to a psychiatric unit, and then foster care when her mother refused to have her back in the family home.

Re-inventing herself and carving a career under another name, she is stepping into her own adult identity, and then her mother’s death brings everything crashing down around her.

The terms of a bizarrely twisted will not only reignite the anger of her aunt and cousins, but leave Cara with no choice but to move home. The scene of the Heldean Haunting is framed, for those of us who, ahem, are old enough to remember it, by the real life television event, ‘Ghostwatch’, conceived and written by horror author Stephen Volk

(For those who enjoy horror, I thoroughly recommend checking out his works, he is on Twitter and a lovely chap to boot!)

The narrative is told from Cara’s perspective and honestly, your heart breaks for her as she faces up to the malign influences which have broken her childhood to pieces, robbed her of a brother and left her doubting her own sanity.

Variously called a ‘hoax’, an impossible event for which the only solution is a sleep deprived, mentally ill young girl, Cara has a massive uphill battle ahead of her in trying to piece together her past, in order to try and make a future free from the child haunting spectre of Limey Stan.

This is who she has adamantly blamed for the death of Matty, her 6 year old brother, the one who disturbed her sleep to the point of violent and aggressive behaviour. But if no one listened to her back then, will anyone listen to her now?

Especially when she moves back into the family home and the tapping noises start again?

A brilliantly conceived story of inherited memory, social perceptions of mental illness, and the lengths people go to to hide dark secrets, this is a thriller unlike any I have read for quite some time. Haunting and scary in the best ways, I really , really enjoyed it.

About the author…

Michelle Davies was born in Middlesex in 1972, raised in Buckinghamshire and now lives in north London.

Her debut crime novel, ‘Gone Astray’, was published in 2016 and features Family Liaison Officer DC Maggie Neville as its central police character. Gone Astray was part of a two-book deal with Pan Macmillan and the follow-up, ‘Wrong Place’, also featuring Maggie, is out now. Her third in the series, ‘False Witness’, is due out in July next year while a fourth,‘Dead Guilty’  followed in 2019.

When she’s not turning her hand to crime, Michelle writes as a freelance journalist for women’s magazines including Marie Claire, YOU and Stylist. Her last staff job before going freelance was as Editor-at-Large at Grazia and she was previously Features Editor at heat. She began her career straight from school at 18, working as a trainee reporter on her home-town newspaper, the Bucks Free Press

Twitter @M_Davieswrites @OrionBooks