Today I’m taking part in the blog tour for The Murmurs. My review is written with thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me on the tour and to Orenda Books for my copy of the book.

Blurb:

In the beginning there was fear.

White-hot, nerve-shredding fear.

Terrifying premonitions of deaths.

And then they started…

The Murmurs…

On the first morning of her new job at Heartfield House, a care home for the elderly, Annie Jackson wakens from a terrifying dream. And when she arrives at the home, she knows that the first old man she meets is going to die.

How she knows this is a terrifying mystery, but it is the start of horrifying premonitions … a rekindling of the curse that has trickled through generations of women in her family – a wicked gift known only as ‘the murmurs’…

With its reappearance comes an old, forgotten fear that is about to grip Annie Jackson.

And this time, it will never let go…

A compulsive gothic thriller and a spellbinding supernatural mystery about secrets and small communities, about faith, courage and self-preservation, The Murmurs is a startling and compulsive read from one of Scotland’s finest authors…

Review:

I’ve read a few of Michael J Malone’s books now and loved them, and The Murmurs did not disappoint either! It’s a novel that doesn’t really fit into a particular genre: there’s some supernatural, some horror, some history and some crime, and the author weaves everything together brilliantly. His writing is wonderful, descriptive but so vivid, and this helped me to be swept along by this fascinating story.

In the beginning of The Murmurs, Michael J Malone spends a lot of time laying the groundwork for what is to come, but that is not to say in any way that the novel struggled to capture my attention, in fact, the very opposite! There are sections from a diary written in the distant past, sections from the time when Eleanor, the mother of the protagonist, Annie, was pregnant, and sections from the present day. This gives the reader many different perspectives of the story, but it never makes it complicated. It just adds to the richness of the story and the intrigue between each of the layers.

The plotting in The Murmurs is another level, and once the foundations are laid, they are definitely there to be shaken. There are so many secrets to be uncovered and I could not stop reading until they were. 

The Murmurs is available from Amazon.

You can follow the rest of the blog tour here: