Daisy Darker

Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney is a standalone psychological thriller published in August 2022, her fifth novel and an instant New York Times bestseller. It's the book that most clearly announces itself as an Agatha Christie homage - the marketing says as much, the setting confirms it immediately, and readers who love And Then There Were None will recognise the architecture from the opening chapters. What Feeney does with that architecture is, in typical fashion, entirely her own.

Daisy Darker was born with a broken heart. Literally - a congenital condition has defined her life since birth and shaped the way her family has always seen her: fragile, overlooked, loved almost exclusively by her grandmother Nana. Now Nana is turning eighty, and has summoned the entire Darker family to Seaglass - her crumbling gothic house on a tiny tidal island off the Cornish coast - for a birthday party that she has all but announced will be her last. The family arrives grudgingly: Nana's son Frank, a musician whose career always mattered more than his children; his ex-wife Nancy, who has never successfully concealed her preference for her eldest daughter; sisters Rose and Lily, each carrying their own thorns; Daisy herself; her niece Trixie; and Conor, a family friend who arrives by boat against the incoming tide. When the water rises and closes the causeway, the eight of them will be alone on the island for eight hours.

At midnight, as a storm moves in, Nana is found dead in the kitchen. An hour later, the next family member follows. And each hour after that, another body.

The Murder Mystery structure Feeney builds is both a loving tribute to golden-age closed-circle plotting and something she actively destabilises as it proceeds. Every member of the Darker family has motive - old wounds, financial dependency, years of petty cruelties, and the matter of Nana's will, which surprised nobody more than the people who expected to benefit from it. The Family Legacy running through the book goes back decades, and the Generational Conflict between Nana's vision of what her family should have been and what it actually became gives every character an emotional layer underneath their suspect status.

Daisy narrates, which is worth knowing going in: the Unreliable Narrator quality here is less about a character hiding facts from readers and more about the nature of how the story is being told - a quality some readers pick up on early, others only understand at the end, and which makes the novel an exceptionally satisfying second read. The Dark Secrets buried in the Darker family go back further than the present-day deaths, and Feeney uses the countdown structure - an hour, a body, another hour - to pace their revelation with real Gothic atmosphere.

The Twist Ending has been among Feeney's most enthusiastically discussed - widely considered by her readership to be the strongest in her catalogue, and genuinely surprising even to readers who suspected they'd spotted it early. The Mystery and Secrets Revealed land with cumulative emotional weight as well as shock value, which is what separates this from a puzzle-box exercise into something that lingers.

Taylor Jenkins Reid called it "an absolute thrill." Lisa Jewell described it as "clever, compelling, confounding and absolutely delicious." Sarah Pinborough - who knows a divisive ending when she writes one - called it "something wonderfully original." Of all Feeney's books, Daisy Darker is the one readers most consistently recommend to friends who've never read her before - the right entry point for everything she does.