Catherine Cooper is a freelance journalist writing for many national newspapers and magazines, specialising in travel. She also makes regular appearances as a talking head on daytime TV. She lives in France with her husband and two teenage children.
Her debut thriller The Chalet was a top five Sunday Times bestseller and spent three weeks in the Kindle top 100. The Chateau is her second novel.
Follow @catherinecooper on Twitter, Visit catherinecooper.net
About the book
A glamorous chateau - Aura and Nick don’t talk about what happened in England. They’ve bought a chateau in France to make a fresh start, and their kids need them to stay together – whatever it costs.
A couple on the brink - The expat community is welcoming, but when a neighbour is murdered at a lavish party, Aura and Nick don’t know who to trust.
A secret that is bound to come out… Someone knows exactly why they really came to the chateau. And someone is going to give them what they deserve.
Review
A new life under the slightly shabby interior and slightly pompous exterior of the chateau, what's not to envy? And yet Nick and Aura have their reasons for leaving a perfect life behind, so when death comes calling they think it's just bad luck on their part. Why would it be anything other than that?
The hook of this plot is the incident, which is vaguely referred to throughout and the details are drip fed to the readers as we get deeper into the story. It creates this kind of two-tiered experience of the characters. The before and after versions of Nick and Aura - you may find them pleasantly agreeable at first without the extra information, but the vision of the two is slowly corrupted bit by bit.
That's part of the draw and the fact the read has almost early 20th century life of the privileged expat about it at times. One does like to buy oneself a chateau - purely for entertainment purposes don't you know, right darling?
Without giving too much away about this dark domestic thriller, I think Cooper actually tackles a really valid and current topic within the darkness of the plot. How the actions of one can set a sequence of events in motion, which could have been avoided and yet ultimately ego and misinformation drive a decision towards tragedy.
Buy The Chateau at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher: HarperCollins | pub date 2nd September 2021 | PBO Ebook AUDIO. Buy at Amazon com.
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