NO TURNING BACK

A news presenter makes news herself when she kills a schoolboy to defend her baby girl.

After her first day back on the job as co-host of a call-in radio show, anxious new mother Anna Graves takes her infant daughter, Joni, for a walk along the beach in her seaside village on England’s south coast. She’s already feeling threatened by scruffy teenagers when a wild-eyed boy in a school uniform runs up to her and pulls out a knife. All Anna has for protection is a long-toothed comb, but it’s sufficient to kill him in a scuffle. She’s not charged with his death, which was clearly self-defense, and when the tragedy goes public, many admire her for bravely protecting her child. But when a minor indiscretion she’d committed with a married co-worker comes to light, suddenly Anna the hero is Anna the adulterer, and her guilt about that brief incident adds to her lacerating remorse about killing the boy. He would have died anyway; he was dosed with digitalis, just like the victims of the mysterious Ophelia Killer, who 20 years earlier used the same drug on teenage boys and left their bodies floating in garden ponds surrounded by flowers. Anna’s father, an investigative reporter, had become so obsessed with the case that he threw himself from the top of their lighthouse after an argument with Anna. She’s never forgiven herself for accusing him of neglecting his family, and she has guilt to spare for telling off a bullying co-worker. Her life goes from bad to worse when speculation that she might be an Ophelia Killer copycat makes the local detective eye her with new interest. As her friends abandon her and she begins to doubt herself, her only support is from her loyal grandmother and a much less likely source. Nothing, however, prepares her for the horror when the real killer comes after her.

Readers’ sympathy for Buchanan’s (The Lost Mother, 2016, etc.) suffering heroine will be sorely tried by her endless wallowing as momentum builds toward an over-the-top denouement.