Family Friend

Listened to as an audiobook over several weeks – this sometimes leads to abandonment as I drift off too much but in this case I was to pick up from where I left off and enjoyed the story. It is about Imogen (“Immy”) who to her great surprise inherits a large house from an artist she and her mother and sister spent a summer with many years ago. It turns out that there are many secrets from that time, and even earlier, that are gradually revealed by clues left by the artist in her final work. The red herrings and misdirections that give the plot its twists rely on a few too many coincidences of timing, but each incident on its own is fairly plausible; they all just happen within the compressed timescale of the story. There’s quite a bit of exposition in the final chapters, and some good twists (many aspects we the reader could see coming but not quite how), and I never liked the boyfriend right from the start. Not my first Claire Douglas novel and unlikely to be my last.