Daisy Darker

Image credit: Pan Macmillan Australia

I won’t use the word ‘sad’ to describe this, rather ‘tiresome’ or ‘unsatisfying’. Those readers’ ruts one can fall into where they read book after book and enjoy the stories well enough, but don’t get those emotional tingles that can only be mollified if the book is in your hand and your hand is turning its pages. It seems I have been in one without really knowing it for… I don’t even know how long now… but I am happy to report that I have just broken it! With our latest book-club book, I might add, which makes it an even better victory. The book is Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney.

A dysfunctional family is brought together to a celebrate Nana’s eightieth birthday in her secluded, Cornish house perched on its own private island. The night is civil enough, but the mood sours when Nana reveals what’s been left to whom in her will and then is later found dead in the kitchen with a dark poem and a strange videotape left behind. Stuck in the same house for eight hours until the tide goes out, the Darker family’s tensions, angers, and fears reach breaking point, as their numbers dwindle.

I powered through this book in four days, intermittent bouts of reading, but could have very happily given up work and food for one day just to be able to sit on the couch and read non-stop. A recognisable gothic whodunit with a surprise twist at the end, Daisy Darker really gave me the good-read tingles.

Feeney very cleverly uses the building blocks of the genre to manipulate the reader, so it’s a delightful ping-pong reading experience of going back and forth between family members to decide who is the killer. While many of the deaths and red herrings can be a little cliched, it all works with the book’s characters, so no harm done.

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The characters themselves, while definitely recognisable from any dysfunctional family setting, are still compelling enough to want to read about and see what sort of poetic deaths befall them. And the prose is very easy to traverse through, clean and unencumbered by pretentious adjectives or verbiage, while also exploring the misdirecting nature of the unreliable narrator. In fact, the first-person narration from Daisy is what really works to blind you to the clues and while the reveal and explanation at the end can feel a little hand-wavey or tacked on, there are enough character hints dropped throughout the story, that work to back it up.

I found Daisy Darker really compelling and have already promised to lend it to two friends now that I’ve closed the cover on it. It’s a bit of a return to the classic, noir, whodunnit, a la Agatha Christie, and I enjoyed absolutely every minute of it!

Author: Alice Feeney, 2022

Published: Macmillan (London), 2022