Alice Feeney: Daisy Darker

Alice Feeney shows that our darkest secrets will always haunt us:

After years of avoiding each other, all of the Darker family have been summonded to Seasglass, the home of the matriach of the family Nana, to celebrate her 80th birthday one that she believes will be her last. As each arrives, each family member harbour  secrets they don't want anyone to know. The funny thing about seaglass that it becomes an island as the tide comes in, no one can come or go safely until the tide is gone, 8 hrs without anyone able to access it. The at the stroke of midnight, Nana is found dead and a strange poem is written on the wall and then the next hour another body is dicovered. The family is trapped on the Island with a killer and the answer as to who is hidden in the past.

I will admit that after I read And Then There was None by Agatha Christie a few years ago, I did wonder if the book could be modernized in some way. Though this book does not take place today, it does take place in the time of flip phones and lacking of cell phone coverage.

Due to the fact that this book is based upon / uses another book as a major plot aspect i'm not really sure to how to review it without giving some thing away from both this book and And Then There was None.

Overall,  I am not 100% sure how I feel about this book. I did enjoy it and did not see the large twist that occurs in the end (which honestly the book needed or else it felt too much like ATTWN up until that point) but I just wanted more. And if I'm being entirely honest it is the twist that makes this book but I felt that the book relied a bit too much on Christie's novel to truly make it Feeney's own. The similiarities are, multiple POV, The Poem, The Poem telling how each person will die, all happens in one Night/Day and the overall reason that each person has been chosen to die. I mean the book is creative in it's creation of the Poem and how it goes about modernizing it, I think i just wish on a little less reliance on the original book.

I think Nana was my favourite character and even though she is the first to be killed off, you really get a sense of who she was with all the scenes from the past that are played out. She is truly the only one who seemed to show love in the Darker family and not just always to Daisy but the other people in the family as well, though not shown as frequent.

I'm torn whether you should read And Then There was None by Christie before this book or after as  I think you should read it not only because of how heavily it influenced this book but it is a book that holds up from when it was originally printed (minus the name and the poem which have been changed) in regards to plot and how it all plays out. Christie really was ahead of her time.

I did enjoy the book but not as much as I was wanting or expecting to. I know that I want to read more by Feeney and look forward to another book I read by her.

Enjoy!!!

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