CLAIRE LADDS

Author of character-driven psychological literary fiction and other darker books, all with an emotional pull

crime and mystery fiction

Sad Cypress (Read Christie Challenge, April 2026): Beloved Book in my Collection

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Image shows Sad Cypress book cover facing outwards on a bookcase filled with Agatha Christie books. Text on the image reads: Agatha Christie Challenge 2026, April. My choice for beloved in my collection, Sad Cypress.

I am still reading my way joyously through the list of books I have chosen for the Read Christie challenge this year. During April, participants were tasked with choosing a book which is beloved in their Agatha Christie collection. Now, there are many that I really like, and some that I absolutely adore. There are also one or two of Christie’s novels which have captivated a part of me and won’t let me go. So, actually, this became a really tricky choice, as I had to decide where to place other books, and in which months, for the challenge. Ultimately, my choice came down to the two novels which captured my heart from the moment I first read them: Sad Cypress or Endless Night. I will certainly be discussing Endless Night later in the year for a different month’s premise. Today, it is Sad Cypress that I have chosen as ‘beloved in my collection’.

I remember more vividly than most of my reading exploits the day that I began reading this novel for the first time. I was a teenager of about fourteen, and one with a huge capacity for imagination. I read this book in our back garden but before long, if you had asked me where I was, I would have described a very different place. So absorbed was I in the world of Sad Cypress that I was reading in the gardens of the ancestral home inside its pages, a rose trellis close to me with the breeze cascading the aroma of red roses all around my head, as I sat at a little table which held a plate of fish paste sandwiches, and indoors, when I went to continue reading out of the sun and sat on the imaginary giant wooden spiral staircase, a black medical bag magically opened, revealing a tube of Morphia. Only something about it did not seem quite right…

Now, I feel, this bizarre description might need putting into some sort of sensible context. Here is a brief summary of the book, in case you have never come across it before (there are no spoilers regarding ‘who did it’, but there are details which appear further into the book, so please skip this part if you want to read it with no preconceptions of the plot):

~

Elinor Carlisle, heir to to her aunt’s fortune, stands in the dock, accused of murdering Mary Gerrard. An anonymous letter suggests that Elinor and her fiancé, Roddy, (also a relation to old Mrs Welman by marriage) need to watch out for Mary, who is becoming all together too close to Mrs Welman and may make trouble where inheritance is concerned. But, once Elinor and Roddy head to their aunt to see what all the fuss is about, things get much worse. Roddy’s visceral and sudden love for Mary Gerrard causes the engagement to be broken off. Worse still, their aunt dies. Meanwhile, Mary, now with a small provision made to her by the very honourable Elinor, has made a will – so now it seems she has something to leave to its recipient. Elinor, too, has made a will, leaving everything she inherits to Roddy.

While clearing out the house before its sale and also that of the associated lodge where Mary’s father lived, Elinor makes fish paste sandwiches, and invites Mary and nurse Hopkins who has taken a shine to Mary and is helping out, to have lunch with her. An hour later, Elinor and nurse Hopkins find Mary dead.

Did Elinor poison Mary Gerrard by adding Morphine to the sandwiches? The police are so convinced by this theory, and the evidence which backs it up, that she is in the dock for murder. Or could someone malign be framing Elinor to suit their own ends? Doctor Lorde, who attended to old Mrs Welman, is determined to get Elinor off at all costs, and enlists the help of his friend, Hercule Poirot to do so. Poirot, being Poirot, intends to seek out the truth, even if that might mean he discovers that Elinor is actually guilty of murdering Mary Gerrard – and of other atrocities along the way. But sometimes there are things even Poirot does not want to know…

~

So, why exactly is it so beloved in my collection? The answer is threefold: Christie’s use of structure, her treatment of character, and the thematic undercurrent that pervades every aspect of this book.

Firstly, structure. The story itself is cyclical and I truly love a cyclical story. We begin in the courtroom, where Elinor Carlisle is being accused of the murder of Mary Gerrard. And, to be honest, as readers, we do not know if she did or not. So Christie takes us back to the beginning of the whole event: to the point when Elinor and her fiancé, Roddy, receive an anonymous letter warning them that someone may be trying to get their hands on the inheritance. We follow the whole process to the murder, and then to Elinor’s arrest. And so begins a separate section – the investigation by Poirot, with everything a reader can expect, from the questioning of suspects through to Poirot’s own quirky ways of finally bringing his findings to a conclusion, which he always states will be the truth, regardless of what that is. We are pulled this way and that over who might be guilty throughout the entire middle section of the novel. Finally, we return to the courtroom, where the excitement mounts and justice is delivered – and we, the readers, finally discover whether Elinor is guilty or innocent.

I will look at character and the thematic undercurrent together, as they are intricately linked. The people in this book have a great deal of hidden depth, which I absolutely love. Christie is excellent at hinting at what is below the surface through events that happen or have happened in the past, or through partially thought-out ideas of her protagonists. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the character of Elinor Carlisle. She can appear as someone rather lacking in passion on the surface, but when we spend time reading between the lines of everything Elinor does, says and in particular thinks, we find a woman who is extremely emotionally aware of herself and of the devastation that love, and betrayal, can cause a person. Her thoughts are powerful, passionate, sometimes dangerous and take her to the brink of murder (whether she goes through with it I will leave you to discover for yourself).

The hidden emotional depth appears to run in the family. One of the most powerful features of this novel, for me, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the murder mystery. I have always been fascinated by the painful undercurrent of the tragedy of love and, indeed, I think this has always appealed to me the most about this book. The emotions, particularly those which are buried from everyone but the reader, and those which have been hidden due to years of societal expectation, are strong and carry the motivations of certain characters throughout (I am being careful to avoid spoilers here). Mrs Welman has a past which she has been holding close to her heart for decades. When we discover what this is, I think it is impossible not to feel anguish for the old lady’s plight, and a distaste for the social, political and legal situations which prevent a deep and enduring love from being fulfilled. Poirot, however, with his astute and sympathetic understanding of the intricacies of the human heart at its most passionate, loving, vulnerable and, indeed, dangerous, shows himself to be so much more than the quirky little Belgian detective who uses order and method and collects facts alone. He shows himself to be human. For me, the ones in which Poirot is sunk into the grey areas of the guilty and the innocent are always the best Poirot stories because it adds a level of complexity to the vehicle for crime-solving. Poirot’s detection is impeccable here. While reading I am both rooting for him all the way, and also hoping against hope that he finds something which will acquit Elinor, as the evidence is stacked ridiculously high against her.

If you have never read Sad Cypress, if you love Agatha Christie books, or if you are trying them out for the first time, if you are a Hercule Poirot fan (as I am, as you will most certainly know if you have read other posts of mine or are in my Readers’ Club), or if you find intrigue in the complexities of love, passion and secrets which society prevents women from revealing while also being embroiled in solving a mystery and all of it flanked by the courtroom drama which plays out over the Accused (and yes, I am aware there was a lot there), then I heartily recommend this novel. You can then read it for yourself and see why it is my Read Christie choice for April.

You might also like:

The ABC Murders (Read Christie Challenge, March 2026): Book that made the biggest impact on me as a young reader

Death on the Nile (Read Christie Challenge, February 2026): My choice for ‘beloved characters’

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The ABC Murders (Read Christie Challenge, March 2026): Book Which Made the Biggest Impact on Me as a Young Reader

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March’s Read Christie 2026 theme has been to choose and read one of Agatha Christie’s books which made the biggest impact on me as a young reader. With a prompt such as this, choices for every single reader are going to be intensely personal and individualised ones. I smiled when I saw the remit for this month because I was able to go straight to my bookcase and pick up a novel without hesitation. My choice for March is The ABC Murders. Let me explain why this has been, and will no doubt be, the easiest reading decision I make for this challenge and probably for the entire year.

So, what is The ABC Murders about? Before I go any further, I’ll give a brief explanation. Hercule Poirot receives a letter, telling him a murder has been committed in Andover – but this is a strange missive, as it comes directly from the murderer, typed, mocking Poirot and daring him to do something about it, and about the murders which threaten to follow. Indeed, the next one will be in Bexhill. The letter is signed ‘A.B.C.’. Poor Mrs Asher who runs a sweet shop in Andover is the first unfortunate corpse. So begins a series of deaths, always with a copy of the ABC railway guide left behind. Poirot, assisted by Hastings, and with Inspector Japp also joining them on the trail, need to capture this murderer as every part of the country begins to wait for it to be its turn and the victims use up all the letters of the alphabet. Meanwhile, the mentally fragile Alexander Bonaparte Cust has just been given a job selling stockings. He has all his equipment for finding his customers all across England: the stockings in a case, a typewriter, and copies of the ABC railway guide…

I was fascinated by this story, the way it built upon itself piece by piece, by the investigation and the clues until they converged in an ingenious solution right at the end, and, of course, by the distinctive characters on both sides of the moral and legal fence. If you’ve read any number of my blog posts and articles, or you follow me on social media (@claireladdsauthor, if you’d like to), you might know that I have an enduring love affair with all things Agatha Christie. This certainly isn’t because I write mysteries myself, or not in the way readers interpret conventional ‘mystery fiction’, certainly. Writers don’t write in every genre that they read. I have an immense respect for mystery fiction authors; the plotting of the crime or mystery has to be intricate and finely woven with breadcrumbs of detection and clues interspersed with red herrings, all while ensuring the characters are wonderfully developed and function as they need to. This respect I have was planted the day my dad came home from town with a copy of The ABC Murders.

I remember vividly Dad presenting it to me, as a ten-year-old. He already knew I was the kind of reader who devoured The Secret Seven (I wanted to be one of them. I’d have volunteered to be Scamper the dog’s next biscuit if it meant I could get in that shed and listen in on the secret conversations). Dad had also bought me some of the Famous Five and Nancy Drew books and had watched me devour them. But this present, on this evening, felt like something else, something special. He told me he had seen it and thought I would like reading it. Why this particular Christie book, I have no idea, but I did know that he’d bought it from our local bookshop, and I also knew that the entire middle section of the shop had multiple bookcases which only housed Agatha Christie books, with roughly ten copies of each one on the shelves. It was a sight to behold, and I used to spend ages staring at it when I went into the shop, no doubt much to the secret irritation of the man who ran the fountain pen section directly opposite. Having me propped incessantly against his glass counter I imagine did his pen sales no good at all. To his absolute credit, he was a very lovely elderly gentleman who never once asked me to move, even a little bit.

As a young reader, this was a pivotal moment in my reading. It was an indelible mark in my mind that I’d gone ‘up in the world’, had become an adult reader. This change in mindset paved the way for, not only my devoted and voracious devouring of Christie books, but also many others. My bookshelves have filled non-stop ever since, not only with Agatha Christie, but with so many kinds of books which have interested me over the years. I did move to either side of the Christie shelves in the shop (eventually, and every so often as curiosity and the need to regain bloodflow in my bookcase-rooted body drove me), to the works of the Bronte sisters, and of Thomas Hardy, and Keats and Daphne du Maurier, and Jean Rhys and Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Aeschylus and so many Ancient Greek and Roman writers, and … the list was endless, because I felt I was allowed to read beyond children’s books. That one igniting incident of being given The ABC Murders had fuelled my fire as a lifelong reader and had given me permission to explore the worlds between the pages, and to expand. It was as if my imagination had been given wings and it flew and flew, never running out of energy because it was constantly being fed.

My imagination had, of course, also been given Hercule Poirot. Dad could not have picked a protagonist more perfect for me. From the moment I began reading about him, I adored him. It led me to spend an inordinate amount of time preventing customers from seeing the full range of fountain pens available in my local bookshop’s beautiful pen section because I spent every spare minute gazing upon the Christie bookshelves, with a voracious need to hunt down every Poirot story I could lay my hands on. To aid me in my Poirot hunt and beyond, I typed up an alphabetical list on my clunky, manual typewriter, so I could tick off every Christie book I bought and read. I still have that original list somewhere. My utter adoration of Poirot from the outset has also led to many hundreds (or likely thousands) of hours watching film and TV adaptations of the Poirot books, too. This has been my solace and comfort blanket on many, many occasions, and my obsession. Even my Masters dissertation was written on Agatha Christie’s books and adaptation! This is the wonderful thing about reading. It can lead you down so many rabbit holes of complete joy and fulfilment, specific to you.

Ultimately, what I can wholeheartedly say is that, while I love the book itself, it has always been much less about the story within The ABC Murders than receiving the novel as a representation of adult fiction which has caused it to be the Agatha Christie book which has made the biggest impact on me as a young reader. I doubt my dad could have guessed at the impact giving me that one Agatha Christie book would have on the rest of my life. But I’m unendingly grateful for it. I often hear people telling me that it was ‘X’ book which hooked them on reading. I’ve been hooked all my life. It’s why, as a young reader, I always hoped for a book as a present, and as an adult I have no hesitation in giving them as gifts. I would urge anyone to give a book to someone; you never know – it could be you who begins their love for literature, and a gift that will last a lifetime.

You might also like:

The Sittaford Mystery (Read Christie 2026: Best beginning)

Death on the Nile (Read Christie 2026: Beloved characters)

Death on the Nile (Read Christie Challenge, February 2026): Book Containing Beloved Characters

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February’s task for the Read Christie 2026 challenge, as set by the Agatha Christie team, has been to read a book containing ‘beloved characters’. The team chose Mrs McGinty’s Dead, and it’s a great choice, featuring as it does both Hercule Poirot and Ariadne Oliver. As with January’s read, I have chosen to deviate from the suggested novel to reflect on my own choice for a book with characters beloved to me: Death on the Nile.

As with the Christie team’s choice, mine also contains Hercule Poirot, who happens to be my absolute favourite Christie detective, and possibly my favourite detective of all time. He was the first detective I encountered in adult crime novels, when my dad bought me a copy of The ABC Murders. I devoured it at the age of ten and became completely devoted to all of the Poirot stories. Without really realising it, I had also encountered Poirot much earlier, growing up as I did on Sunday afternoon cinematic films on the TV, several of which were the Peter Ustinov versions of Poirot, glamorous films, with Death on the Nile being one I saw multiple times, and also featuring the wonderful David Niven as Colonel Race. Moving on several decades, the David Suchet version of Death on the Nile is one of my favourite films in which he played Poirot. With all that in mind, I was always likely to be drawn to this novel like a moth to a flame. And it is the characters in the novel that I will discuss here.

Hercule Poirot

Out of all of Christie’s novels which involve recurring characters, it is Poirot who is my enduring love. I’m not even sure I can fully explain, even to myself, why he intrinsically appeals to me. What I do know is that I love his quirky dress and mannerisms, and the way he goes about picking at the carcass of a crime, piece by piece, until all the scraps of clues have been used up and explained. I also find it very endearing that he has such a humble backstory, one of being a child of a large family who had to make a success of himself to support them. A man who was injured during the First World War and was taken care of by a woman in England (and if you read The Mysterious Affair at Styles you will get a fuller flavour of this), and has a strong appreciation of poverty and desperation, and of skills of workers, which makes him an empathetic detective who treats a Duchess in the same way as he treats her maid (or, indeed, in Death on the Nile, the downtrodden, poor relation in the same way as the high-born, wealthy one).

Most of all, I love his approach to the human side of crime. He knows that, somewhere at the heart of the motive, is something intensely personal which reflects the way the victim lived their life and how it impacted the people around them. And he also shows himself to be, not just a problem-solving machine, but a human, too, considering the feelings of other people in the case, showing empathy, sympathy and, indeed, humanity. There are several cases he solves whereby he allows justice to take its course in an unconventional way. This is one of those cases, and highlights Poirot’s knowledge and acceptance that, sometimes, there are morally grey areas to consider, along with intertwined compassion for the perpetrator as well as the victim. This is, of course, Poirot’s subjective view, but it leaves the reader with plenty to consider: how would we have handled the final dishing out of justice?

The underrated sidekick

Now we turn to the sidekick. Ex-MI5 agent, Colonel Race is deployed by Christie in this role here. He appears part-way through, and is there to do some investigating of his own (the sub-plot of which I won’t spoil here). I always enjoy an appearance by Colonel Race; I find him a truly likeable man and a consummate professional, therefore a great extension of Poirot’s own impeccably performed investigations. It is interesting to watch these two professionals work through their findings. An appearance by Colonel Race always means that something much wider-reaching than a crime motivated by the private and personal is lurking in the background, which gives an extra edge of danger to the atmosphere, and therefore joining his investigations with Poirot’s reminds us that the world can be a dangerous place, both without and within our own lives. For me, Colonel Race is one of Christie’s underrated characters.

Impassioned suspect

I’ve alluded to the crimes I feel Christie is particularly expert at creating: those seeded in the intensely personal. These frequently interweave with the emotional, and are character-driven. And, as we know, getting inside the head of the people close to a crime is Poirot’s forte! There are few characters in any of Christie’s novels in which the emotional comes into play as much as in the initial prime suspect here, the impassioned Jacqueline de Bellefort. She is immediately suspected of the killing of Linnet Doyle, her former best friend who stole her ex-fiancée, Simon Doyle, and married him within weeks. After this devastation to her life, we next meet her as she follows the newly-weds to all the locations of their exotic honeymoon and confesses to Poirot that she has strong desire to shoot Linnet. Poirot both sympathises with her desperate emotions and is extremely fearful that such strength of feeling leaves Jacqueline herself in danger from her own passions.

Jacqueline frequently lingers in my mind when I think of Christie novels. Her emotional intensity has stayed with me from the very first time I read about her, decades ago. She is one of those stand-out characters who make me consider whether my actions would have matched hers, should I have been placed in her situation (which contains such huge spoilers that I cannot detail them here), and has gone a long way to inform me, as a writer, how someone could be driven almost entirely by the emotions burning within them. I believe that Death on the Nile is worth reading to follow Jacqueline’s story alone.

Other enduring characters to give us pause for thought

There are other truly enduring characters for me in this book. Once again, my choices revolve around the human qualities with which Christie has endowed them. I want to focus, in this section, then, on the mothers, and their younger female counterparts. Two mother stand out: the tormented Mrs Otterbourne, writer of romance which has been shunned by the libraries and increasingly her readership, and has turned to drink, and Mrs Allerton, possibly the most kind and caring mother that Christie ever wrote about in her fiction. The absolute pain of Mrs Otterbourne, which plays out in the tempestuous relationship she has with her long-suffering daughter, Rosalie, is placed into opposition with the almost idealised mothering of Mrs Allerton. She is an extremely endearing person, whom Poirot likes immensely, and who is ultimately able to provide comfort and love to Rosalie in a very humble, selfless manner. As a reader, I can’t help but feel desperately sorry for one, and admire the way the other is prepared to take on a ‘found family’ mother-daughter dynamic, based purely on her innate kindness of soul. Combined, they leave us with a lingering unease around the concept of motherhood, and the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship.

There are two other characters I would like to make mention of here, too: Rosalie Otterbourne, long-suffering daughter of the aforementioned Mrs Otterbourne, and Cornelia, poor and downtrodden relation of the high-born Mrs Van Schyler who has a secret. I have immense sympathy for Rosalie, dealing as she does with the difficulties of her mother’s professional and personal downfall, and struggling with her own entanglements of resentment of her mother and her undeniable love for her. Cornelia, by contrast, is blissfully unaware that she is being treated abominably by her rich relation and is grateful for the opportunities afforded her in being allowed to come on the excursion down the Nile. This unawareness and her accompanying obliging behaviour, led by the controlling Mrs Van Schyler, is what makes me have huge sympathy for Cornelia. However, what I love about both Rosalie and Cornelia is their strength of character, Rosalie’s which has had to be of a sustained nature to protect her mother, and Cornelia’s, ultimately, in choosing to follow her own path of love, unrelated to social position or money, both of which she could have and which would give her a ‘better’ life.

So then, for me, Death on the Nile contains very particular kinds of ‘beloved characters’: the repeat characters who are respectful and consummate professionals, and the women who fill this entire novel with everything it is to be human: the passion, suffering, resilience and, yes, love. In saying this, I am, of course, very aware of the discrepancy between gender roles and that males are given that of logical fact-finder and puzzle-solver whereas women are given the roles of the impassioned, the reactive, driven by a need of some kind. Yet, heading towards a hundred years after the book was written, this is what makes the women in particular stand out as sympathetic, real people, of their era and beyond, and I love that. There are other men in this novel whose actions provide the plot points for the story, such as the thief, or the fraudulent professional, yet continually it is the women who provide the heart of the story so that it is not merely a two-dimensional puzzle (and Christie’s books never are! If you don’t believe me, then I urge you to read Endless Night or And Then There Were None). This gender separation throughout may even be why the book ends with the promise of marriage between a man and woman who find a tempered middle ground between hard, factual logic and passionate interiority, thus drawing together facets of both. Could it even be Christie suggesting that extremes of either are unhelpful to us if we want to live a happy life? I’ll let you decide.

You might also like:

The Sittaford Mystery (Read Christie 2026: Best Beginning)

Have You Read No Deadlier Time Yet?

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The nights are dark… The cold envelops you like an embrace from Death himself, and the wind whispers its secrets through the cracks and crevices of your mind… What better time to read a dark, Gothic-inspired crime and suspense book like No Deadlier Time? The best part? No Deadlier Time is available as an e-book for 99p/99c/your country’s equivalent for the rest of November (and I might even extend that into December – call it an early Christmas present!).

BUY NO DEADLIER TIME

In case you’ve never encountered the novel before, here’s the book description:

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A family with dark secrets. Will someone kill to keep them?

Neve Eldritch is pregnant, happy, and has one wish – to get her husband, Harry, to reconnect with his family. Neve has never met them – and with good reason. Now there’s a chance to move into the family home and heal a long-standing rift. Going home can’t be that bad. Can it? But something feels wrong from the moment they arrive.

When you’ve avoided the problem for so long, it’s bound to rear its ugly head. All Harry ever wanted was to be worthy in his dad’s eyes. There’s a secret to success, one his dad has taunted him with as a boy, but now he’s gone to drastic lengths to stop Harry getting hold of it. Desperate to prove himself, Harry takes matters into his own hands – with deadly results.

But Harry isn’t prepared for what the horrifying key to his family’s success really is, and it’s spiralling out of control. When murder follows murder, he’s sure he’s committed them. How can he stop himself and keep his family safe when the secret he now holds won’t let him – and he can’t remember any of it?

Suspicions run rife in Neve. Her husband is lying to her. Is he crazy? Or is he a killer? Or maybe – just maybe – someone, somewhere, wants rid of him, and they’ll do anything to get what they want. And she’s sure they’re here, at the isolated family home. Do they want to kill her, too?

Terrible choices lay ahead if anyone is to get out alive. One person can save them all. But time is ticking away… and it’s proving to be deadly.

Be careful what you wish for… you just might get it.

This book is part of the Darker Minds crime and suspense thriller series: Dark minds are at work. Sometimes it takes a darker one to stop them.

~~~

There are other books in the Darker Minds series. All these books are standalone novels and can be read in any order:

Show Me Dead

That Killer Image

You can also get a FREE copy of Beneath the Flesh as a welcome gift when you join my Readers’ Club.

So… if you want the darkness to envelop you, and hold you close as you read a devastatingly dark tale of family secrets, impetuous murder, and deadly dreams, grab your copy of No Deadlier Time for 0.99, curl up by candlelight… and be careful what you wish for!

FIND YOUR PREFERRED STORE AND BUY HERE

No Deadlier Time: Read an Extract (Do You Love Prologues?, Part 3)

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Welcome back, to part three of my mini-series on my love for prologues. And, you know, I really do love them! I have realised that, to date, all of my novels have some form of prologue, although not all of them are labelled as such.

I love planting seeds (and definitely not the gardening kind – my dad could tell you about my efforts from a very young age at how adept I clearly was, even then, at destroying the planting!). The seeds contained in a prologue could, potentially, make or break a reader’s full experience of the story – or the story that I, as author, have imagined you will experience, that I want you to engage with and think about, long after you’ve read the book.

As I said in Part 1 of this mini-series on prologues, there are various reasons for using a prologue in a story, but the most important thing to remember as a writer is that it has to do something. It’s not just a random scene that is disconnected from the story. Quite the opposite – it’s intrinsic to the story in some way. Without it, it’s possible that there are deeper elements to the narrative, or potentially even basic and important ones, that the reader would miss out on if the prologue wasn’t there.

If you’ve read any of my books, or read the extracts in the other posts in this mini-series, you may have realised I have often used the prologue as a device to point the reader to something that happened at some time before the book ‘proper’ gets started. In the extract from The Secrets That Haunt Us, for instance, the letters directly impact the ‘present’ of the story. Because of those letters, two characters have already set their course of action for the story, and the prologue goes some way to explain why, although the full impact of those letters at the beginning is fully and tragically clear until much later on. In the extract from That Killer Image, an event in the villain’s past leads to his atrocity later in life – and here I also give the reader a sneak peek into the truly creepy, split-second, psychological moment that follows him through the entire novel.

Today’s extract is the prologue from No Deadlier Time. This book is a suspense thriller which borders on (or for some readers, is) also psychological horror. Again, because I just can’t help myself it seems, this reveals a past event which impacts so much more than the main characters of the story. It foreshadows what might happen, should Harry, a boy in this prologue, follow in his father’s footsteps once he’s older. But does he? You won’t know unless you read the book (no spoilers here!). It also introduces another character who appears in a minor role here, yet is embroiled in this family’s story in ways you can’t possibly imagine. Or can you..?

Please note that, as my extracts are crime-related books or dark fiction of some kind, they are suitable for an adult readership. Please read responsibly.

Happy reading!

Claire

~~~

Prologue

MAY, 1949

‘Come closer, Jonah. Come on. You’re not afraid, are you? Not of this. I can see it in your eyes. Are you afraid of me, then? You’ve got it the wrong way round, boy. Such the wrong way.’

The laughter that leeched out of the man was bitter. The teenaged boy clung onto the back of the hard chair, as if his young brain had decided to use it as armour. The man stopped laughing and sat up as straight as he was able, forcing himself to look powerful. He couldn’t have a barrier between himself and his son. He needed to show the boy. Let him know what his fate would be. It was the perfect sixteenth birthday present. It was everything he had. And the boy would have to take it, soon, whether he wanted it or not. Whether he understood it or not. And whether he could control it. Or not.

His reflection caught in the silver teapot, held captive and distorted there. His eyes didn’t look like they belonged to him anymore. He seemed more like a wild animal, bloodshot veins clambering all over his eyeballs, his mouth snarling and baying for blood. But whose? Did it matter anymore, after everything that he’d done?

‘Come and see its secrets.’ His palm lay outstretched, the fob watch perched in its centre. Tick, tick, tick. The sound filled his head and lingered in the air. It drowned out the ravens outside. Was this a blessing or a curse? As he looked through the window and across towards the other wing of the house, it was impossible to ignore that they were gathering on the roof of his wife’s bedroom, lining up, watching. Waiting. If the window was open, they would fly in and pluck him to pieces with their lethal, midnight-coloured beaks. They’d already devoured his mind.

His son crept forward, his face fixed on the white raven that sat at the top of the watch. He knew that was what Jonah was looking at because he’d done exactly the same, that day the watch had become his. You’re mesmerised by the raven; you hear the ticking of the watch; then life is there for the taking. And you can’t match yourself against the power of it all.

‘Do you know why this watch is special, Jonah?’

The mop of dark hair on the boy’s head shook a ‘no’ while his eyes grew wider as he got closer and his face became transfixed. All the birds were visible to his son now – one at every hour. The object in the man’s palm no longer looked like a watch, not to him. Just a conspiracy of ravens. The eleventh hour had come and gone. It was ingrained in his skin now, in his soul. Just the last hour to go – he felt it coming to an end. Felt the stare of the white raven.

‘This. This is the secret to our success. It’s been the driving force of the Eldritch family for, oh, who knows how long? It whispers things to the first-born son, gives us power. There has been a first-born son for generations. You’re the next one. The chosen one. You’ll have all the secrets. The watch will give you the power to build on everything this family has achieved. But there are rules to follow. Every man has to follow rules, doesn’t he?’

His boy nodded, his dark eyes still wide. Such a serious face.

‘Yours are written down. And the ones that aren’t, well, you’ll find them. Here.’ He screwed his finger end into the side of the boy’s head. Two eyes screwed up in a flinch, then stared back at him again.

‘Do you want this watch, Jonah?’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen.’

‘Yes. It’s the best. And the worst. But it belongs in this family. Only to this family. It would be useless – and beyond cruel – to give it to anyone else. Remember that, always. It will belong to you, soon.’

If it was possible for those two young eyes to grow wider, then they did. The reflection of the watch face caught in them. The ravens danced in his irises. It had started.

‘Really? Promise?’

‘Yes. I promise, son. And you’ll be able to do anything. Be unstoppable. Because the watch will let you. You’ll feel it, and you’ll also feel when it’s time to pass on your gift to a son of your own. Don’t pull a face. There will be one. This isn’t a family of first-born females. It can’t be. There’s a reason it mustn’t be. And I hope you never find out why.’

The knock came, soft but determined. He was prepared for it. The young woman entered and hovered awkwardly, like a butterfly weighed down with its fate.

‘Excuse me, sir. You said two minutes to midday, sir.’

‘Thank you, Rachel.’

He gripped his boy’s arm. ‘Remember what I said, Jonah. You are my son. Everything that I have will be yours.’ He shut his eyes, just for a second. He heard the ticking. ‘You have no choice.’

He nodded in the direction of the young woman, not much more than a girl really, who looked at him with tears in her eyes and an expression of last-minute hope that he’d changed his mind. He’d burdened her too much, and for that he was sorry. He wanted to smile at her. He tried. But all he felt were his bloodshot eyes fastened onto the unspoken terror in hers.

His boy left the room, his shoulder encased in Rachel’s arm. She would keep him occupied. Make sure he didn’t come back into the room until it was over. Then all of it – the boy would have no choice for it to be his. Oh, the way Jonah had looked at the watch. He was his father’s son. He would believe everything he told him in the letter, true or not.

He laid the pistol on his desk. Poured himself a whiskey, opened the window, hung out of it and made a toast to the ravens. One flew over and sat on the windowsill. Caw, caw, caw. There was the ticking, the time running out, the sound of the raven, caw, tick, caw, tick, caw, tick. They were one and the same thing now.

The whiskey went down in one swift slug. He shut his eyes and a raven grew up out of the ashes of a thousand others. It cawed in time to the chimes of the watch: One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven.

He didn’t hear the twelfth strike. No one in the house did. Just the sound of the pistol.

***

TODAY

Do you believe that a house is evil and that, because of it, everything and everyone inside becomes ingrained with it, too? I don’t mean the actual bricks and mortar. At least, I don’t think I do. The house is the family, and the family is the house, after all.

I mean that rumours infiltrate whispers as people sit in the pub and get drunk, or while they’re milling around the front door of the post office, waiting for the queue to die down and for it to be their turn. Or maybe someone sees something and spins a tale of intrigue and invents superstition, just for attention, or just to pretend to themselves that it could actually be true. And then people start believing all sorts. Is this how it works?

Is it inherited, the way things are in an old family with centuries of dubious deeds and lies buried inside the walls? Do old sins cast long shadows? Or, just possibly, is it those dreadful, unspeakable things we’re told – those family secrets – that stay festering in our minds until they feed on the unsuspecting, on the innocent? And then they make a home in those who are susceptible to their malign charms.

I’ve given you my best guess about the way this particular story started, but the rest of it is as accurate as I can make it, reading between the lines. Truth is like holding liquid mercury. It shifts, slides, and it can be poison. When someone doesn’t want to tell you their story, sometimes you just have to wait. Wait until it surfaces, and until you can make sense of it. Or you can try.That’s where I come in, or otherwise you’d never hear about it. This is what I do. It’s my job, my livelihood. It’s a calling. I take someone’s story, and I try to give it the ending they want. Or that they need. I try so hard. But this is one I couldn’t help to make better. Because I am its ending, and its beginning. You’ll see what I mean.

A choice of books (with prologues!)

No Deadlier Time by Claire Ladds
BUY HERE
Show Me Dead by Claire Ladds
BUY HERE
That Killer Image by Claire Ladds
BUY HERE

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Darker Minds Crime and Suspense Boxset OUT NOW!

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It’s out today! I am thrilled to tell you that you can now buy, download and read the digital boxset containing three of my Darker Minds Crime and Suspense books, just in time for the Christmas holidays. This first bundle in the series of standalone psychological and suspense thrillers can be downloaded on lots of different e-book stores – so if you’ve not yet discovered the first three in this set of books, now is your chance to grab a trio of books in one go. (If you want to cut to the chase and not read the entire post, you can find the boxset here).

Here are the descriptions of the three books in the bundle:

Show Me Dead

THE DEEPER YOU GO, THE DARKER YOU GET. THE STAGE IS SET…

Ripped away from her circus family and kidnapped, Angel finds herself the unwilling ‘guest’ in a dilapidated theatre, belonging to a man who calls himself the Puppet Master.

She’s not the only captive, either. All of the broken and terrified people below ground are forced to perform for a very darkly discerning audience.

When performers begin to go missing, no one knows why, or who will be next. Fear is growing and Angel intends to ensure one thing – that it won’t be her. What is happening here? Just who is the Puppet Master, and what does he want with her? Angel may well wish that she’d never found out. But is he really the one pulling the strings?

To save them all and get to the truth, Angel has to perform the darkest show of all. But truth comes at a price. And someone will pay…


That Killer Image

THREE PEOPLE. ONE KILLER. AND A PICTURE SOMEONE WILL DIE FOR…

When Vicky meets Anthony, she sees him as a happy distraction from her claustrophobic relationship with her housemate and self-appointed guardian, Fran.

Anthony already knows Vicky because he has been following her every move. She is perfect for what he needs – a model for the ultimate photo of his life’s work – and he will do anything it takes to get that shot.

But Fran is not so easy to get rid of. Haunted by the disappearance of her sister, and blaming herself, she is desperate not to make the same mistakes again with Vicky. And when push really comes to shove, she has other ideas about that killer image.

Beneath obsession lurks something more deadly…


No Deadlier Time

A FAMILY WITH DARK SECRETS. WILL SOMEONE KILL TO KEEP THEM?

Neve Eldritch is pregnant, happy, and has one wish – to get her husband, Harry, to reconnect with his family. Neve has never met them – and with good reason. Now there’s a chance to move into the family home and heal a long-standing rift. Going home can’t be that bad. Can it? But something feels wrong from the moment they arrive.

When you’ve avoided the problem for so long, it’s bound to rear its ugly head. All Harry ever wanted was to be worthy in his dad’s eyes. There’s a secret to success, one his dad has taunted him with as a boy, but now he’s gone to drastic lengths to stop Harry getting hold of it. Desperate to prove himself, Harry takes matters into his own hands – with deadly results.

But Harry isn’t prepared for what the horrifying key to his family’s success really is, and it’s spiralling out of control. When murder follows murder, he’s sure he’s committed them. How can he stop himself and keep his family safe when the secret he now holds won’t let him – and he can’t remember any of it?

Suspicions run rife in Neve. Her husband is lying to her. Is he crazy? Or is he a killer? Or maybe – just maybe – someone, somewhere, wants rid of him, and they’ll do anything to get what they want. And she’s sure they’re here, at the isolated family home. Do they want to kill her, too?

Terrible choices lay ahead if anyone is to get out alive. One person can save them all. But time is ticking away… and it’s proving to be deadly.

Be careful what you wish for… you just might get it.

As I mentioned earlier, each book in this digital boxset is a standalone novel, and perfect for readers who love dark themes and crimes mixed with twists, turns and lots of suspense. I hope you enjoy my Darker Minds Crime and Suspense books.

Happy reading!

Darker Minds Crime and Suspense Boxset 1
Grab your digital boxset HERE