My review is written with thanks to Simon & Schuster for my copy of Based On A True Story via Netgalley.

Blurb:

A lavish 70th birthday party. A body found on a storm-lashed beach. And a secret that someone is dying to tell…

Famed children’s author Dame Eleanor Kingman has summoned her family and friends to her exquisite manor house on the cliffs. They’re celebrating her birthday – and her latest number one bestseller in her series of books based on a mother fox and her cubs.

But the night before the party, Eleanor receives an email: an email that threatens to expose the lie she’s kept up for over half a century.

Someone knows her secret. Is it her estranged literary agent? Is it her ex-husband, to whom she no longer speaks? Is it the nanny she fired all those years ago, who always did have a knack for storytelling? Or is it one of her three daughters, all of whom have a stake in the publishing empire she has built…

With a TV crew arriving to film a documentary of her life, Eleanor needs to find out who sent the email – and preserve her multimillion-pound career.

But when push comes to shove, and it’s time to tell the truth – will anyone actually believe her?

Review:

I’ve read all of Sarah Vaughan’s previous books and loved them, so I was really excited to get my teeth into Based On A True Story. Sarah Vaughan is a great storyteller who creates flawed but compelling characters and these are all on show in this novel. 

The protagonist of Based On A True Story is Eleanor Kingman, a bestselling author who is approaching her 70th birthday. Some of the chapters are written from her perspective, while others focus on her daughters, Gilly, Rachel and Delia and her son in law, Tom. This helped me to get to know these characters well and I loved it. They all have their demons and there are some quite serious issues going on in their lives, which makes them really interesting people to follow and I really wanted to know how each of their situations would be resolved. 

The novel begins with a dead body in the prologue, and this poses so many questions at the beginning of the story. These remained in my head throughout the time I was reading, and ensured I was fully engaged in the story the whole way through. The tension bubbles under the surface and I love the brilliant sense of atmosphere that Sarah Vaughan has created in this novel. 

Based On A True Story is available from Amazon.