​The pace of this story is slow most of the time. It moves along like the waters of a Fenland river, quietly deceptive but perfectly capable of running wild. It allows the reader to wade in deeper and deeper until fully immersed, unable to back away, committed to going through to the other side.

The Vermuyden family have recently moved to a new build house in the Cambridgeshire Fens. All the houses on the estate are falling apart and no-one seems prepared to accept responsibility for the problems. To me, the state of the decay of the house perfectly mirrored the state of the Vermuyden family dynamic.

Patrick wanted a successful teaching career but despite doing everything right and being the perfect son his life isn't turning out the way he wanted and he has to borrow money from his free-spirited younger brother in order to, quite literally, keep his head above water.

Grace had a feral childhood. The neglect, trauma and abuse she endured have led to a deep-seated need for order and certainty in her life. She is determined to provide her daughters with the safe, comfortable, controlled lifestyle she never knew while growing up.

Lily is seventeen. A teenager coping with the fallout from a doomed summer romance while facing all the pressure that comes with being academically gifted.

Ten-year-old Mia is prickly and difficult to be around, but she is fiercely loyal to the people she loves.

This is a complex story with characters that are, in the most part, well developed. It shows how little we sometimes know about the people closest to us.

There is a lot of misdirection going on in this book. I thought I knew what was going to happen, who did what, and the reasons for everything. I was wrong. All my assumptions were proved incorrect but that just made for a much more enjoyable read. ( )

One second, Lilly Vermuyden is sitting in her English class, the next she is lying on the floor convulsing uncontrollably. What’s wrong with the 17-year-old teenager? The doctors take test after test but do not seem to come closer to the cause for her seizure. Rumours start spreading and Lilly’s mother Grace totally freaks out. How could she not protect her daughter? Only Lilly’s younger sister Mia seems to know what is going on: archaeological excavations close to their home must have evoked evil spirits who now haunt the living. Mia gets totally worked up in her theory and behaves even stranger than normal calling her teachers into action. Life in the well-ordered Vermuyden household is close to collapsing and thus, well-hidden secrets threaten to be uncovered.

Fiona Neill’s novel sounded intriguing and actually it mixes quite some enthralling aspects: a family in which everybody seems to be on the watch in order to keep their secrets, a young girl totally immersed in Anglo-Saxon history and fascinated by spooky tales, and a medical incident that seems to be too complicated to find an easy explanation. Yet, somehow I couldn’t really connect to the story.

The story mainly lives on the characters who were multi-faceted and interestingly drawn. First and foremost, Lilly who is a typical teenager who hides her private life from her parents since she does not want to destroy the picture they have of her. She tries to please her mother und fulfil the expectations but can only fail here. There is some mystery about what happened that made her collapse that keeps suspense high throughout the plot. Her mother, on the other hand, is quite unsympathetic since she is a total control freak who does not grant her golden girl one millimetre of free space. There is a reason for her behaviour, yet, this is only inserted in a very brief excursus and thus remains too superficial to make her a really remarkable and complex character. Admittedly, I soon got totally annoyed with Mia. For quite some time I was wondering if she is somehow autistic since she doesn’t seem to understand how she tramples on the other characters’ feelings. Then, I thought she was rather precocious before I came to the conclusion that she is simply an entirely malignant egoistic young person. The father, Patrick, ended up deeply in debt and so weak that the story could have been told without him.

There are some major questions raised about family life, parenting, growing-up and how much privacy is healthy for people close to each other. It all adds up in the end, yet, somehow, I had the impression that a bit more focus on one or a maximum of two characters would have been better. ( )