


“A man who can’t love, but desperately needs to be loved, is a dangerous thing indeed.” In her efforts to keep him in her life, Noelle concocts an audacious, devious, and psychotic plan. So… when she meets a man and falls in love with him, that love is unhealthy and obsessive.

She loathes herself, and this, along with other events in her life, cause her to become mentally unstable. At the age of forty-one she is still a virgin. Extremely clever, she nonetheless finds it very difficult to make friends and she is estranged from her family. This tiny decision sealed Ellie’s fate forevermore… Noelle tells Ellie she has a practice paper that will help her when she writes her math GCSEs, she suggests that as she just lives around the corner, Ellie should quickly drop by and pick it up. Ellie even went so far as to label Noelle a ‘bunny boiler’ in her diary.

She found her habits strange and she ‘smelled’. On her way to the library she meets up with her old math tutor, Noelle Donnelly. her GCSE’s were coming up soon and she wanted a quiet place to revise. Just weeks before her sixteenth birthday, Laurel’s daughter, was on her way to study at the library. She is cleverer than she has any need to be, but also not as clever as she thinks.”Įllie Mack. “Poppy is clearly a strange child, who is both charmingly naive and unsettlingly self-possessed. Also, Poppy looks eerily like Ellie, her daughter who walked out of her house ten years ago never to return. He home-schools her and she has little knowledge of what it is to be a normal ‘child’. For one thing, Floyd seems besotted with her. When their relationship progresses, Laurel meets Poppy and gets a feeling that something is not quite ‘right’. His name is Floyd Dunn, and he is a single Dad to his nine-year-old daughter, Poppy. When she meets a man one day in a cafe, she thinks that – just maybe – she can salvage her life and have some happiness. Laurel is finally trying to create some sort of a life for herself. She has a tenuous and somewhat cold relationship with her daughter Hanna, and her son Jake. Now Laurel has sold the family home and moved into a flat by herself. Paul met another women who was there for him in a way that Laurel no longer could. Her marriage ended three years after Ellie’s disappearance. She was no longer ‘ there‘ for her two remaining children, or for her husband, Paul. When Ellie disappeared physically, Laurel disappeared emotionally. Her daughter, Ellie, was the light of her life. Laurel’s youngest daughter vanished ten years ago. It is nice to discover an author who you know you will read automatically – a ‘ go to‘ author.įirst we meet Laurel Mack. This is the third title I’ve read by Lisa Jewell and I’ve decided that her novels are all consistently good.
