‘The Perfect Village’ by J M Hewitt

Published by Canelo,
11 April 2024.
ISBN: 978-1-80436-507-6 (PB)

Gated communities always seem to have an air of mystery. Who are they trying to exclude? What do they have to hide? What dark secrets are lurking behind closed doors?

Wolf’s Pit hasn’t always been a gated community. It used to be a small village of old houses, where everyone knew each other. Vivacia Williams has lived there all her life, first with her mother, then later a few doors away with her husband in the house her grandmother owned and gave to her. To her, Vivacia; not to her husband, chancer Charles Lomax. It was Lomax who brought in the developers, and persuaded everyone to sell their enormous gardens, and so the village doubled in size and gated community came about. He told Vivacia she agreed, after her mother and grandmother were killed in a dreadful accident, but she has no memory of signing any paperwork. She has very little memory at all of the months that followed that terrible day. And now Charles has disappeared.

Then one day two small children appear, dirty, malnourished, uncared for, almost mute. Vivacia, desperate for love, takes them in. A few days later, after weeks of constant rain, an old well floods, and a body washes out. The community, both old and new, is aghast, no one more so than Vivacia; the body is Charles.

What ensues is a chain of events no one could have predicted: more deaths, revelations about the past, long-kept secrets uncovered. The story unfolds in three-time frames and two locations, and piece by piece it’s all exposed: how the community became broken, how it re-formed with a different shape, where the children came from, what happened to Charles. And through it all there’s Vivacia, abused, damaged, but full of love for the two scraps of humanity the world has brought her, and desperate to keep them.

It’s a strange tale, peopled with quirky characters and set in a place which appears idyllic from the outside but harbours its own version of darkness and shadow. Questions abound from the start, and the path towards answers is a convoluted one. This is no ordinary story of murder and mayhem, but there are plenty of moments which made me scratch my head, others which had me on the edge of my seat. Even when all the answers are in place, there are still questions. Gated communities always have an air of mystery.
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

J.M. Hewitt is a crime and psychological thriller author. Her work has also been published in three short story anthologies. Her writing combines the complexity of human behaviour with often enchanting settings. In contrast to the sometimes dark content of her books, she lives a very nice life in a seaside town in Suffolk with her dog, Marley.

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives in Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.