Title: The Cottage
Author: Lisa Stone
Year: 2021
Genre: Crime/Thriller
An isolated cottage, a tap at the window and a forest with secrets are all part of the mystery in Lisa Stone’s crime thriller The Cottage. The book was selected for my Zoom book group and I went in to it with no prior knowledge of the book.
Jan Hamlin has lost it all, her boyfriend and her job and has taken a short-term tenancy at Ivy Cottage next to Coleshaw Woods to look after Camille’s dog Tinder whilst she is abroad working. It seems like the perfect escape and a chance to recuperate after all that has happened in her life. However when she starts to hear stange noises and taps at the window, things take a dark turn and it soon becomes clear her nightmare is just beginning…
Meanwhile, Ian and Emma have just given birth to their second stillborn child. Shocked it has happened to them again, Ian begins to look into his and his wife’s genetic history, to see if there is a reason why Emma has miscarried twice but will he live to regret digging up the secrets of the past…
When I started this book, the setting of the Cottage and the noises Jan was hearing did immediately pull me in to the story as it starts right in the action and it was the chapters set here that were my favourite in the book as Lisa Stone does an amazing job of creating an atmosphere of isolation which even descends into horror at times.
However as Emma and Ian were introduced whilst the story about their babies being stillborn did initially intrigue me as the action suddenly moves from Jan so you start to wonder how these two stories interwine.
Yet, I did quickly find myself guessing quite a few of the twists early on in the story and given that the book is advertised with a twist you couldn’t see coming I did unfortunately find many of them quite predictable and it panned out more or less how I imagined it was going to.
