A taught and compulsively clever psychological thriller that you can’t put down!

A live-in nanny, a dysfunctional blended family, a selectively mute little girl and the hallowed grounds of Oxford University all come together with unexpected results.
All told from Dee’s p.o.v as she is being interviewed by the police about the disseverance of her employers eight year old daughter, Felicity, this is not the fastest paced thriller or the most action packed but it is full of some great characters who are in turn endearing, comical, vile and downright despicable as well as parts of Oxford that get brought to life across the pages, it is most certainly a page turner of a book.

The whole book is brimming with tension and atmosphere as the events lead up to Felicity’s disappearance and beyond to a conclusion that you probably won’t see coming.

If you are a fan of psychological suspenses then you are in for a treat with this book.
I am a relatively slow reader but I gobbled this book up in two sittings as I just couldn’t put it down!

Magpie Lane will be published on 02 April 2020 and is available to pre-order now ( )

Dee works as a nanny in Oxford, and has had a series of stints with visiting faculty and administrators, working for the university on a temporary basis. She has just finished one such assignment when the next one falls in her lap: caring for Felicity, the 8-year-old daughter of Nick Law, a new College Master, and his Danish wife Mariah. Felicity’s mother died four years earlier, and she has been selectively mute ever since, speaking only with Nick. Dee sets out to earn her trust.

But readers also know that one evening Felicity disappears, and the media and law enforcement launch a major campaign to find her. The novel chronicles, in parallel, the events following Felicity’s disappearance and those leading up to it. As tiny details are revealed, it becomes clear there’s more to Dee than she wants others to know.

The full picture emerges slowly. Author Lucy Atkins expertly weaves a number of plot threads together, and most of the details are revealed by an unreliable narrator. It kept me guessing all the way to the end and even now, while I know more about what happened to Felicity, there’s much left unsaid. This was a great read. ( )

This is a psychological thriller involving an unreliable narrator, Dee, who is nanny to the child of an Oxford Master. When the novel opens, the nanny is being questioned by the police after the child, 8 year old Felicity, has gone missing. The story goes back to tell of Dee's prior life, her engagement to care for Felicity, and the troubled history of Felicity, who has been mute since the death of her mother several years before.

This was a competent mystery. I especially enjoyed a lot of the background bits about the goings on and traditions of the university at Oxford. There's a real sense of place, and also some information about some of Oxford's perhaps lesser-known attractions.

3 stars ( )

A thriller about an Oxford nanny whose charge is a troubled eight year old girl with selective mutism. The girl's father and her stepmother are far to busy to spend time with her and they both live in the attic of an old house, which feels haunted. There's even a small, secret room in the child's room that might be a priest's hole, but is supposed to stay locked, because the wallpaper inside contains arsenic. At the opening of the novel, the police are questioning the nanny about the girl, who disappeared during one of the nanny's rare weekend's off. At first, she's sure they just want background on the family, but as the questioning continues, she realizes that she might be a suspect and, as things are revealed about her past and her time in this position, the reader begins to think they might be right.

So this was a fun thriller. Nothing substantial, but the characters were interesting, if broadly drawn. I don't generally like when the reader has access to the narrator's thoughts and yet information the narrator knows is held back, but it was not too annoying here. I'm not sure whether the author exerted great restraint in ending the novel where she did, or if she took the easy way out, but it was different. ( )

Magpie Lane. Lucy Atkins. 2020. I downloaded this Kindle book because of the title-I thought I’d read that it was going to be a PBS series, and I wanted to read it before I watched the series. This isn’t the book the series will be based on, but it was an interesting novel. The troubled child of a Master at Oxford has disappeared, and the nanny is being interviewed by the police. The Master is new to the college, and he and his Danish wife are not particularly caring parents and are having trouble being accepted by the old Oxford crowd according to the nanny. The child doesn’t speak, has nightmares and is an emotional mess. The house they live in may be haunted. The more the nanny talks to the police the more we realize that the nanny may have some problems too. ( )