Long and Short Reviews welcomes Catriona McPherson who is celebrating today’s release of Go to my Grave. Leave a comment or ask the author a question for a chance to win a copy of the book.
Donna Weaver has put everything into The Breakers. Now it waits – freshly painted, richly furnished, filled with flowers – for the first guests to arrive.
But as they roll up – these couples and cousins, all in their forties – each one discovers they’ve been here before. Sasha had his sixteenth birthday at scruffy old Knockbreak House, as it was. Peach started a life of boozing there. Rosalie and Paul started the life they still share. Buck and Jennifer had one night they barely remember. They’re the lucky ones.
Because the party that started with peach schnapps and Postman’s Knock ended with a girl walking into the sea.
Sasha’s parents hustled the children out of the spotlight. And as for the kids themselves? They made three vows of silence – “lock it in a box, stitch my lips and go to my grave”.
But one of them has broken the pact. Someone engineered this weekend back at the scene of the drowning. Someone is playing games, locking boxes, stitching lips. And the third vow is waiting.
Enjoy an Excerpt
A car door slammed, out on the gravel. I nipped to the side of the window and looked down. A navy-blue Range Rover had pulled up, slantwise, right across the front door, and a man was standing there with his head thrown back, staring so the house was reflected in his sunglasses.
He had to be one of the guests. He was dressed exactly like a townie dresses for a country weekend: brand-new cords, brand-new waxed jacket the same colour as his car, an inch of a checked collar showing above the neck of his cashmere. I edged in closer to the glass for a better look and, as I did, the passenger door opened and a girl stepped out. A woman. She matched him like the other side of the cuckoo clock: long legs in dark red jeans, tall boots, a sheepskin gilet over her angora. She was beaming and her hair bounced and shone as she skipped round the back of the car to stand beside the man. She took his arm and squeezed, then reached up onto her tiptoes and pecked his cheek.
It happened too fast for me to be sure. One minute she was kissing him, holding onto his arm, and the next she was sprawled on her arse. I’d have said she overbalanced, if he had stooped to help her up again. If she was still beaming.
But he was back in the car and she scrambled to her feet, rubbing her hands on her red jeans. Heels of your hands on the gravel like that, they had to be stinging. The car was moving and she hopped and hobbled after it. She managed to get the door open and herself into the seat as he gunned the engine and squealed away.
About the Author:
I was born in Edinburgh and lived there, in Ayrshire, in Dumfriesshire and in Galloway before moving to California in 2010. I don’t know how they did it, those early emigrants who set off forever from Leith docks. I’m back home every year for a couple of months and I still can’t watch Burnistoun without sobbing.
A born swot, I finally left school at age thirty with a PhD in linguistics from Edinburgh University. Proper jobs have included banking (hopeless), library work in local studies and fine art (marvellous), and a short burst of academia (miserable). I’m now a full-time writer and hope never to have a proper job again.
When not writing, I’m reading, gardening, cooking and baking, cycling in Davis, running through walnut orchards, getting to grips with this outlandish and enormous country (43 states visited so far!) and practising an extreme form of Scotch thrift*, from eating home-grown food to dumpster-diving/skip-surfing for major appliances.
*when “making a living” as a writer, thrift helps a lot.
Buy the book at various venues or Amazon.
When recent high school graduate Cameron Carter lands an internship with Congressman Billy Beck in Washington, DC, he thinks it is his ticket out of small town captivity. What he lacks in connections and Beltway polish he makes up in smarts, and he soon finds a friend and mentor in fellow staffer Ariel Lancaster.
Peter Stone is a lifelong fan of thrillers on the big screen, small screen, and page. Prior to his career in TV and film marketing, he worked in Washington, DC, first as an intern on Capitol Hill and later as a Spanish tutor for a former Speaker of the House. The Perfect Candidate is his debut novel. He lives in Tokyo, Japan, with his wife and two sons. 
Spenser Collins
Ian K. Smith is the author of nine New York Times bestselling nonfiction books, several of them, including Shred and Super Shred, #1 bestsellers, as well as one previous work of fiction, The Blackbird Papers. He is a graduate of Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine.
Is she a medium? A psychic? Alexa Bentley only knows one thing for certain; she can talk to ghosts. And sometimes, they take her advice. Alexa’s unusual ghost therapy skills take her to a remote corner of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. But this case is much trickier than anything else she’s ever encountered. A grieving ghost, several missing teens, and a supernatural creature from Native American folklore stand in her path. Along the way, she manages a bit of romance and lots of witty humor.
