310 Pages
- The Blurb...
Megan Pritchard is reported missing during a party in an isolated house in the Vale of Glamorgan.
A short time afterwards, her body is found. It looks like an accident, the result of consuming too much alcohol. But DI Mandy Wilde is suspicious. And Megan’s friends are hiding something.
As Mandy and the team dig deeper, they uncover a catalogue of secrets, and reasons why being friends with Megan could be difficult.
A series of disturbing activities come to light, adding lies, blackmail and trolling to a complex murder investigation.
- My Review...
This book follows DI Mandy Wilde as she finds out the circumstances of the death of Megan Pritchard. Megan was not a likeable person, but she did have a few friends. They were with her at an isolated house in the Vale of Glamorgan. Could one or more of her "friends" be responsible for her death, accidental or otherwise. Mandy also has other things going on in her life. Her sister has disappeared and left her in charge of her niece. Her DS is depressed and going through a marriage breakdown. To cap it all her boss makes her take on a new DC. Is the new DC a spy in the camp to report on Mandy?
Women are very much at the forefront of this book. Mandy, Olivia (her DC) all the suspects, etc. This is not a bad thing, just unusual and it all adds to the flavour of the narrative.
The dual settings of Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan were a bonus for me. For the uninitiated the Vale is the posh greenbelt area outside of the City. It also had a short sojourn to the rough valleys in the form Pontypridd (twinned with Mordor and Gomorrah 🤣)
The driver for the book is the character of Mandy and her team. Tall and with an imposing glare, she does dirty deeds to get the job done all the while trying to help her DS Josh (played in my head by Kevin Lloyd who played Tosh Lines in the Bill, maybe it's because they were both DS and Tosh sounds like Josh. Odd but it works.) She has also to suss out her new DC Olivia.
While we focus on the death of nasty piece of work Megan Pritchard. I found it surprising that, given Megan's history, they were all still friends years after Uni. The story of the disappearance of Mandy's sister, Joy, bubbles away on the back-burner. Mandy pursues each of Megan's friends in turn, each having reasons for at least disliking her if not hating her. It's a tangled knot that Mandy has to unpick one strand at a time, all the while under constant pressure from her heavily invested boss.
While following the more than capable cast of coppers on their roller-coaster ride, one cannot help but think it would be more fun if they were on a bigger coaster. One would imagine finding someone dead, having choked on their own vomit is pretty mundane in the field of Police investigated deaths. It must happen to most Police forces. Not nearly as exciting as a wallop, bang in your face case such as say finding a lobotomised corpse, ala Crimson Snow, or finding a deceased priest with his nether regions cut out as in Snow That is probably just my preference. I like my fiction to be, well fiction. A little bit out there, a little bit "that cant be true". The Nesting Place reads like true crime, it sticks to reality as far as crime fiction can, if you see what I mean.
Following on from such Crime Fiction TV shows set in Wales as Hinterland and Hidden as well as the docudrama The Prembrokeshire Murders, I would love to see this tale, and subsequent ones in the series be turned into a drama series by BBC Wales or ITV Wales. All the above are set in the more lonely parts of Wales. Time now for one in the Capital, with a occasional trip to the rural Vale.
The word that pops into my head when thinking about the writing in this book is "polished." It is smooth, nothing wasted, no bumps. The cast were also great, realistic and well formed, each with their own issues. Looking forward to their next challenge already.
- Selected Quotes...
“I always think the smell in hospitals in the morning is quite disgusting. It’s that mixture of disinfectant, fried bacon and shit. Gets you every time.”
She’d make a good detective. Instinctive. Listening not just to the spoken words, also thinking about what wasn’t said. What lay underneath.
Our Mums are friends too, so I suppose we stuck together out of habit.” It was a strange thing to say. Mandy thought about how some people did stay together, like in a marriage, because they couldn’t be bothered with the disruption to their lives.
Fear was the smell of a police station. There was something about being in an interview room that left even the innocent feeling guilty. Like the confessional.
If you liked this you may like...
- I Am Here To Kill You by Chris Westlake
- Murder In The Valleys by Pippa McCathie
- The Chair by GB Williams
- About the Author...
As an only child she was a voracious reader and loved stories. Her father was a wonderful storyteller, encouraging her to tell her own stories and developing her love of oral stories. This was the inspiration behind her mini-book, Tell Me Another… Speaking and Listening Through Storytelling and her PhD on the effects of oral stories on young children’s language and imagination.
Jacqui has always been a writer but it wasn’t until 1997 that she started publishing her work with articles in English in Wales and then in the TES. A book for teachers, Exciting Writing, won the UKLA author award. As a former teacher and academic, she published and gave presentations on the value of story for children’s development.
After retiring from academia, Jacqui concentrated on more creative writing, attending classes and developing the craft. She had stories published in anthologies (Honno, MTP) and flash fiction online, and hidden in the depths of her computer are many other stories, a novel, novella and books for children. Like reading, writing is an obsession.
With her friend and colleague, Janet Laugharne, she has written a novel, What Lies Between Them, to be published in February 2022 under the pseudonym J. L. Harland.
Jacqui’s debut, The Nesting Place, was started in lockdown and the culmination of several different elements. It started with Katherine Stansfield’s excellent Crime Writing courses at Cardiff University, pre-pandemic. Then, during lockdown, a further course with Writing Magazine’s James McCreet, when the ideas began to take shape and the feedback from James helped with the process of producing the novel.
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