Many thanks to Tracy Fenton and Compulsive Readers for the book

A difficult book to review. It had a raw gritty feel with bold scenes and graphic words weaved in with the thoughts of the main character.

Frannie, a teacher, came across a woman performing a sexual act on a man with his face in darkness and tattoo on the wrist in the bar. The woman was then found murdered, and a detective came to her flat for questioning. A short affair with the detective was followed by a few shocking revelations.

My first book by author Susanna Moore, the story was shocking in the way it was written and hit me quite hard with its words. Frannie was quite an eclectic woman with a couple of friends. Best friend Pauline too was found murdered, and that nearly killed Frannie and made her take hasty decisions.

The human psyche was pondered upon. Ending was a horrifying twist which took me aback. Overall, this was a murder mystery with a serial killer as the back story and a bold woman living on her terms, comfortable in her own skin, at the forefront living the story.

A different read, indeed.

I received a free ARC from NetGalley and publisher, and this is my journey into its pages, straight from the heart!! STRICTLY HONEST AND UNBIASED.

All my reviews can be read here

Susanna Moore is the author of the novels One Last Look, In the Cut, The Whiteness of Bones, Sleeping Beauties, and My Old Sweetheart, which won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction, and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her nonfiction travel book, I Myself Have Seen It, was published by the National Geographic Society in 2003. She lives in New York City.

Living alone in New York, Frannie teaches creative writing to a motley bunch of students, and secretly compiles a dictionary of street slang: virginia, n., vagina; snapper, n., vagina; brasole, n., vagina.

One evening at a bar, she stumbles upon a man, his face in shadow, a tattoon on his wrist, a woman kneeling between his legs. A week later a detective shows up at her door. The woman’s body has been discovered in the park across the street.

Soon Frannie is propelled into a sexual liaison that tests the limits of her safety and desires, as she begins a terrifying descent into the dark places that reside deep within her.

Publication Date: 31st October 2019