Skip to content
Heartstones

Heartstones

A stand-alone novella published by Hutchinson in


The themes of concealment and the secret female self are central to Heartstones, and the novella uses literary allusions to enhance the sense of dread integral to its Domestic Noir psychological thriller atmosphere. One of the central intertexts is Edgar Allan Poe’s menacing short story The Black Cat, a narrative examining addiction, guilt, concealment, criminal psychology, and male violence.

Jean Anderson 1

Sixteen-year-old Elvira’s mother is dead. Elvira is sad, of course, but not so sad as her younger sister Spinny. Spinny is afraid that their father, Luke, will be heartbroken, but Elvira knows better - after all, Luke has her to take her mother’s place.

But then Luke brings home a pretty young woman and introduces her as his fiancée, and Elvira decides she will stop at nothing to prevent her father’s marriage.

Notes

Contemporary Reads 2

Footnotes

  1. Blood on the Table: Essays on Food in International Crime Fiction, 2018 ↩︎

  2. Book links may earn this site a small commission. ↩︎