Published by Black Swan (Transworld Publishers), 15 June 2017.
ISBN: 978-0-55277979-1
Vicky Seagrave had everything: a
great husband, three lovely children, a nice house in Clapham, and a good job
as a teacher. She was the classic yummy mummy. So, why do things go so
disastrously wrong? To begin with, she almost, but doesn’t quite have sex with David,
the father of one of the pupils at her school. Then she leaves her small baby
son Josh for a short period to look at another house to which she’s taken a
fancy and then, when she comes home and finds an opportunistic burglar with her
son, she drops Josh so that he possibly breaks his arm. Then she lets her best
friend, estate agent Amber Collins who had been showing her round the house,
talk her into spinning a story which is effectively a lie: that she had been in
the house all the time but hadn’t realised there was a burglar until she went
upstairs and found him with Josh. The hospital informs the police who question
Vicky; by now, having read media reports of cases where children who have been
left by their parents, even if only for a short time, are taken into care, she
persists in the lie. And this is where the friendship with Amber begins to
demonstrate that it is essentially hollow. The reader knows, although Vicky
does not, that Amber is jealous of Vicky, of her husband with a good job, that
she lives in a nice house whereas all that Amber and her husband, the amiable
but ineffective Robert, can afford is a rented flat with noisy students as
fellow-lessees, and that Vicky has three children whereas Amber has only one, although
Amber desperately wants another. Amber has already wormed out of Vicky an
admission that she had almost started an affair with someone. Now when she
tells Vicky and Tom that she and Robert are interested in the house that Vicky
would like to buy, Vicky feels obliged to say she has no further interest. Then
Amber asks for money towards the deposit. Vicky refuses but Amber asks again.
And again. And social services become involved. Worse still, if the police
discover that Vicky has been lying to them, she herself will be in serious
trouble. And if Tom finds out about David, who keeps sending Vicky texts, so
will their marriage. And Amber thinks that Tom would be a distinct improvement
on Robert.
As things get more and more disastrous for
Vicky the suspense in this skilfully written story rises to a heart-stopping
finale. Interwoven with one narrative which moves between Vicky floundering in
the morass and Amber’s growing resentment of and anger with Vicky there is
another one from some years before, that of Katya whose mother has died of an
overdose and is now in the care of social services. She loves Maggie, her
social worker and longs to be adopted by her so that her daughter Emily will be
Katya’s Forever Friend, but instead Maggie arranges for her to be adopted by
Sally and Luke. Both Sally and Luke should be good parents; but the problem is
that Luke is rather too affectionate. Ominously so.
An excellent psychological suspense novel
which stands above many others in this crowded field. Highly recommended.
------
Reviewer:
Radmila May
Emma Curtis
was born in Brighton and brought up in London. Her fascination with the darker
side of domestic life inspired her to write One Little Mistake, her
first psychological suspense. She has two children and lives in Richmond with
her husband.
Find
her on Twitter: @emmacurtisbooks
Radmila May was
born in the U.S. but has lived in the U.K. since she was seven apart from seven
years in The Hague. She read law at university but did not go into practice.
Instead she worked for many years for a firm of law publishers and still does occasional
work for them including taking part in a substantial revision and updating of
her late husband’s legal practitioners’ work on Criminal Evidence published
late 2015. She has also contributed short stories with a distinctly criminal
flavour to two of the Oxford Stories anthologies published by Oxpens Press – a
third story is to be published shortly in another Oxford Stories anthology –
and is now concentrating on her own writing.
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