Silent Victim – Caroline Mitchell
Emma’s darkest secrets are buried in the past. But the truth can’t stay hidden for long.
Emma is a loving wife, a devoted mother…and an involuntary killer. For years she’s been hiding the dead body of the teacher who seduced her as a teen.
It’s a secret that might have stayed buried if only her life had been less perfect. A promotion for Emma’s husband, Alex, means they can finally move to a bigger home with their young son. But with a buyer lined up for their old house, Emma can’t leave without destroying every last trace of her final revenge…
Returning to the shallow grave in the garden, she finds it empty. The body is gone.
Panicked, Emma confesses to her husband. But this is only the beginning. Soon, Alex will discover things about her he’ll wish he’d learned sooner. And others he’ll long to forget.
My thanks to Charlotte at Midas PR for the chance to join this blog tour.
Caroline Mitchell’s books are always delightfully chilling and oozing with hidden menace so I was delighted to have the chance to read Silent Victim,
On these dark wintry evenings I had a hankering to read something that may chill me. Silent Victim did just that – unsettling through its subject matter and it twisted my perceptions as I could not be sure which characters were presenting the truth of past events.
The past events are crucial to understanding where guilt may lie. We first meet our lead character (Emma) burying a body in her garden – that’s how you grab my attention from the first page! Then we bounce forward a few years to rejoin Emma…it seems she has managed to keep her dark secret hidden from everyone. However, things are about to get complicated for Emma, her husband has a new job and proposes moving Emma and their baby North to Leeds – if she moves house then how can Emma be sure that nobody shall one day uncover the grizzly evidence of her crime?
Silent Victim is a story of consequences. What could have led Emma to strike out and take someone’s life? The reader gets to see Emma as a schoolgirl when her problems first began to manifest themselves. We also see her as a young wife and mother having to deal with the possiblity of her greatest secret becoming public knowledge. How she chooses to cope with the uncertainty will define her fate and future.
We also get to see Emma’s story from the point of view of the murder victim – her teacher. That was unsettling as we see how he targeted Emma for his attentions and courted her affections…given that she was a vulnerable schoolgirl it was not easy reading at times. Huge plaudits here to Caroline Mitchell for getting the tone of this spot on.
Having read Silent Victim and followed Emma’s story it was easy to see how she had been the victim of a predatory teacher. His death at her hands an unfortunate accident. Or was it? As I said, we get to see the story from the victim’s viewpoint too. While I cannot give too much away about the sequence of events which will bring Emma’s life into turmoil I can share that Emma may not be the most trustworthy of narrators and that makes things *very* interesting.
I soaked up Silent Victim in just two sittings. I lost track of time while I was reading and was twisted every which way as I tried to unpick what I could take as fact from the story Emma was living out. Cracking reading.
Silent Victim is published by Thomas and Mercer and is available in hardback, audiobook and digital format. You can order a copy here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Silent-Victim-Caroline-Mitchell-ebook/dp/B071G5W8HC/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
