The Nightspinners - Tapa dura

Twins Marina and Susannah used to spend their nights 'nightspinning', talking to each other telepathetically through until their teens when Marina started 'blocking' Susannah out. Slowly they drifted apart, leading separate lives until the sudden, violent death of Marina at the hands of an uncaught and unknown murderer. Two years on, Susannah starts to receive anonymous flowers and telephone calls. Then her car is graffiteed. Worse is to follow. Trapped in a basement in a sudden powercut she hears the humming of a childhood song but no-one is there... It soon transpires that she is being stalked in an identical way to Marina in the lead-up to her death and so begins a hunt and chase for a madman intent on killing her. Lucretia Grindle's lyrical writing lulls the reader into a false sense of security, with her reminiscences of long, hot Southern summers. But suddenly she springs terror to the page, catching the reader unaware and thus enhancing the thrill of the plot. A gripping, well-written book with a plot spanning Southern childhood and modern-day Philadelphia. - Lucy Watson

A secret history, a menacing future, and a killer who knows too much . . .'It is our secret. No one guesses that we are nightspinners. No one knows how much we talk, or about the words we weave between us. We work in silence, and when our mother eases the door open she rewards us for what she assumes is our sleep. She whispers "You are such a good girl." She says it just once, to both of us, as if we were one. Which, in fact, we are. We are two peas in a pod. Marina and me. Mirror images. We are twins.Twenty years later Marina is dead, horrifically murdered, her body discovered only three days after the killer struck in her apartment in Alexandria, Virginia. But what haunts Susannah the most is the phone call she never returned, the last chance she would ever be given to make amends with her estranged twin sister. Until, that is, Susannah herself becomes victim to a stalker, someone who pursues her with an uncanny knowledge of her fears, her regrets and her secret history .And so Susannah is forced into a journey back to her childhood home, to the idyllic past she shared with Marina where, very possibly, clues to the murder quietly lie . . .