An incredible, thrilling, murder mystery that spans generations set in the beautiful Scottish countryside, The Cursed Girls is an unstoppable, captivating, read that will leave you in awe of Caro Ramsay's talent.
From the blurb;
'Megan Melvick has spent years avoiding her inheritance, the dark and disquieting family estate Benbrae. It is now home only to her distant, aristocratic father, and her sister Melissa, dying quietly in an upstairs bedroom. Trapped behind her unreliable hearing aids and vulnerable to what others want her to see, Megan is unable to find the answers she wants: why is there a new woman on her father's arm? And why has their absent mother not returned to say a final goodbye to Melissa?
'Benbrae has always been a place of loss and misfortune for Megan, but as the Melvick family diminishes still further, she must ask on final question. If there is a curse on the house, will she be it's next victim?'
A masterful example of the unreliable narrator The Cursed Girls is a story that will entice with it's well wrought characters, gorgeous setting and immense and complicated history.
With many different, sudden, and unexplained deaths marking the history of the family estate the reader is left to puzzle out which of the many tragedies is the key to the mystery, while getting only glimpses, mixed up and muddled through time, of the events that bought our characters to this end game moment.
Told through two perspectives we are tantalized with a ghost story as our main character Megan provides a narrative muddled with confusion and a lack of faith, ever growing, in her own ability to recollect, while her best friend Carla treats us to harder chapters, mostly seen through the lens of the past, that reveal a very different side to Megan and her family than the one we are being spun.
Through these two viewpoints the reader builds a picture of the world in which these two girls grew up, though from very different sides of the tracks, as we delve further into their past and are pushed deeper into the looming threats of the present.
Ramsay gives us facts, put down as undeniable, and then through careful and complex story building begins to pick them apart, leaving us feeling just as precariously footed in our knowledge of the events as main character Megan does herself. This delightful and cleaver crafting truly allows readers to feel embraced within Megan's viewpoint, using Clara's shorter bursts of narrative to gain greater insight, while not necessarily greater understanding of the events.
Chapter by chapter the reader falls deeper into the haze, unable to put the book down as the questions build and nag, desperate for answers, or for Megan to walk away, back to a quieter life in Glasgow.
A dark, twisted, and entirely gripping book The Cursed Girls sits proudly on the mystery shelf.
We give The Cursed Girls Four Stars
ISBN - 978-1-83885-380-8 Cover price - £8.99 First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2021 by Black Thorn.