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Asta's Book

Asta's Book

The sixth Barbara Vine novel published by Viking in


Like all Barbara Vine’s work, the novel is meticulously researched. You can check the route taken by the suspected murderer, Lizzie’s husband, and indeed all the locations, in an A-Z; you can feel the summer heat rising from the pavements, breathe the stuffy air of claustrophobic rooms, and smell the sweaty, stifling clothes.

Shena MacKay 1

It is 1905. Asta and her husband Rasmus have come to East London from Denmark with their two little boys. With Rasmus constantly away on business, Asta keeps loneliness and isolation at bay by writing a diary.

These diaries, published more than seventy years later, reveal themselves as more than mere journals, for they seem to hold the key to an unsolved murder and the mystery of a missing child.

It falls to Asta’s granddaughter Ann to unearth the buried secrets of nearly a century before.

Contemporary Reads 2

Footnotes

  1. A cold fish in a shoal of red herrings, Independent 2011 ↩︎

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