I’m delighted to be part of the blog tour today for The Maidens. I’m sharing an extract with thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me on the tour and to the publisher for my copy of the extract.

Blurb:

St Christopher’s College, Cambridge, is a closed world to most.

For Mariana Andros – a group therapist struggling through her private grief – it’s where she met her late husband. For her niece, Zoe, it’s the tragic scene of her best friend’s murder.

As memory and mystery entangle Mariana, she finds a society full of secrets, which has been shocked to its core by the murder of one of its own.

Because behind its idyllic beauty is a web of jealousy and rage which emanates from an exclusive set of students known only as The Maidens. A group under the sinister influence of the enigmatic professor Edward Fosca.

A man who seems to know more than anyone about the murders – and the victims. And the man who will become the prime suspect in Mariana’s investigation – an obsession which will unravel everything…

The Maidens is a story of love, and of grief – of what makes us who we are, and what makes us kill.

Extract:

Prologue 

Edward Fosca was a murderer.
This was a fact. This wasn’t something Mariana knew just on 

an intellectual level, as an idea. Her body knew it. She felt it in her bones, along her blood, and deep within every cell. 

Edward Fosca was guilty. 

And yet – she couldn’t prove it, and might never prove it. This man, this monster, who had killed at least two people, might, in all likelihood, walk free. 

He was so smug, so sure of himself. He thinks he’s got away with it, she thought. He thought he had won. 

But he hadn’t. Not yet.
Mariana was determined to outsmart him. She had to.
She would sit up all night and remember everything that 

had happened. She would sit here, in this small, dark room in Cambridge, and think, and work it out. She stared at the red bar of the electric heater on the wall, burning, glowing in the dark, willing herself into a kind of trance. 

In her mind, she would go back to the very beginning and remember it all. Every single detail. 

And she would catch him.

***

The Maidens is available from Amazon.

You can follow the rest of the blog tour here: