At the heart of every murder, there’s a child crying.
Kirsten Waller, the famous poet, is found dead in her bath in a lonely Cornish cottage. The verdict: suicide.
Her daughter, Sam, refuses to accept this. Kirsten would never have killed herself. Besides, her mother’s journal is missing and so is the poem she was working on just before she died – and the name of that poem? The Murder Bird.
Was the poem a horrific foretelling of her own death, or was Kirsten planning to expose a killer? Sam is determined to find out. Her step-father, Raph, is equally determined to thwart her.
Soon, Sam is in a race against time to discover the identity of her mother’s killer, before the read Murder Bird tracks her down.
Reviews:
Crime Squad:
‘a truly great novelist who has taken the form and woven an elegant crime element around this group of people who are portrayed as ‘normal’ … be the end of the book, nobody is left unscathed … She can skilfully infuse any atmosphere with a sense of deepening dread.’
Author’s Comment:
‘This book takes place in two of my favourite locations, Cornwall and London, and the main character, Sam, is a cellist, lucky thing. But the phrase ‘At the heart of every murder there’s a child crying’ came into my head after a few chapters and haunted me all the way through. Perhaps it was a reaction to the way murder is so often treated in fiction, like a necessary plot device, maybe frightening or gory, but deprived of its real psychological impact. Almost like a game, It’s up to the reader to discover for themselves the identity of “the child” who is crying in this story. Or maybe there are more than one’.