Sewing The Shadows Together @Alisonbailliex @Bloodhoundbook

Review By J A Warnock
Sewing The Shadows Together By Alison Baillie

‘Sewing the Shadows Together’ by Alison Baillie is a masterclass in simplicity. The pace is exquisite. The story is entirely straight forward and elegantly told.

Baillie seems perfectly comfortable in the role of storyteller and relies on the strength of her characters and plot to keep the reader engaged. There are no clever for the sake of clever narrative tricks. There is no convoluted timeline or staccato structure designed to daze and confuse. There is a measured reasonableness which I found extremely refreshing.

This feeling of reasonableness is not limited to stucture but is also present in the plot. I found that suspicions, worries and doubts expressed by the characters often matched my own thoughts as I read. A thought might occur to me and appear to be corroborated by a discovery a few pages later only to be disproved or confirmed by later events. I felt there were just the right number of clues to string the reader along and keep things interesting.

Much of the story is set in either Portobello or Edinburgh and the atmosphere of both locations is accurately captured. I will admit it triggered feelings of nostalgia for my own youth which shared many locations mentioned in the book though my vanity forces me to add I inhabited these streets some years after Baillie’s characters.

As the story unfolds old crimes and old feelings are intertwined. If you want to know if they are reconciled or resolved, you will have to read ‘Sewing the Shadows Together’ for yourself. Highly recommended.

From The Back Of The Book

Can you ever get over the death of your sister? Or of your best friend? More than 30 years after 13-year-old Shona McIver was raped and murdered in Portobello, the seaside suburb of Edinburgh, the crime still casts a shadow over the lives of her brother Tom and her best friend Sarah. When modern DNA evidence shows that the wrong man was convicted of the crime, the case is reopened. So who did kill Shona? Sarah and Tom are caught up in the search for Shona’s murderer, and suspicions fall on family and friends. The foundations of Sarah’s perfect family life begin to crumble as she realises that nothing is as it appears. Dark secrets from the past are uncovered, and there is another death, before the identity of the real killer is finally revealed… Set in Edinburgh, the Outer Hebrides and South Africa, Sewing the Shadows Together is a thoroughly modern murder mystery that keeps the reader guessing to the end. Filled with characters who could easily be friends, family or people we work with, it asks the question: Do we ever really know the people closest to us?

Huge thanks to Alison Baillie for the advanced copy for review and for featuring on my blog today.

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