Blog Tour ~ Blood Sisters by Jane Corry

Jaffareadstoo is thrilled to be hosting today's stop on the Blood Sisters Blog Tour

PenguinViking
June 2017

What's it all about ...

One Good. One Bad. One Dead.

Alison and Kitty are bound by a secret.

Kitty lives in a care home. She can’t speak properly, and she has no memory of the accident that put her here. At least that’s the story she’s sticking to.

Art teacher Alison looks fine on the surface. But the surface is a lie. When a job in a prison comes up she decides to take it – this is her chance to finally make things right.

But someone is watching Kitty and Alison.

Someone who wants revenge.

And only another life will do …

What did I think about it...

Having been a huge fan of this author's previous novel, My Husband's Wife, I was intrigued, and delighted, when a copy of Blood Sisters arrived for me to read and review. I have to say that I wasn't disappointed with this tale about Alison and Kitty, two half-sisters, for whom life is very different, but who are linked together by the devastating secret they share.

There's a real edge to this story which looks at a family tragedy from the perspectives of both sisters. Firstly that of Alison who is struggling to get by, working as an artist, teaching her unique skill to groups of adults but with no real job satisfaction. When the opportunity to work as the artist in residence at a local open prison comes along, Alison makes the decision to do something different, knowing full well that her life could be altered, for good or ill, by this choice.

And then there's Kitty, who is a full time patient in a care home. Kitty has learning and behavioural difficulties brought about as the result of a catastrophic event which altered her life forever. Kitty is feisty, sometimes funny, and always irreverent in her thought processes and yet she is absolutely trapped in a world where she has enormous difficulty in expressing herself, that is, until she meets Johnny who is also a resident of the home and who encourages some very different emotions.

Blood Sisters is a tight and tense psychological suspense story which has its fair share of twists and turns, many of which I didn't seem coming. It very cleverly combines the lives of two very different women, deftly intertwining their past and their present, all caught up in a story which is rich in the telling and which comes alive with hints of menace, sadness and long buried secrets.

There is no doubt that this author has really captured this corner of the psychological suspense / domestic noir genre. Her writing is always exciting, cleverly explained with no superfluous ambiguity. The short and sharp chapters which gradually unravel the story of Alison and Kitty are done with fine attention to detail, so that the reader is soon immersed in a tale which is riddled with guilt, alive with secrets and filled to the brim with hurt, pain and overwhelming sadness.

Best Read with...Cups of scalding hot tea and some comforting biscuits...

About the Author

Photo credit
Justine Stoddart

Jane Corry is a former magazine journalist who spent three years working as the writer-in-residence of a high security prison for men. She had never been inside a jail before and this often hair-raising experience helped inspire her Sunday Times bestseller My Husband’s Wife. Jane is a regular life story judge for the Koestler Awards given to prisoners for art and writing. Until recently, Jane was a tutor in creative writing at Oxford University. She now runs writing workshops in her local area of Devon and speaks at literary festivals all over the world. She has three grown up children and writes the ‘Diary of a First-Time Grandmother’ column for the Daily Telegraph

Follow on Twitter @JaneCorry Author #BloodSisters

My thanks to the author and also to Annie at Penguin Viking for their kind invitation to be part of this blog tour.

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