THE CHERRY ROBBERS

Book Review

- Kimberley Ballard

RELEASED 2 JUNE 432 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Sarai Walker Publisher Serpent’s Tail

A common motif in Gothic novels is that houses aren’t haunted, it’s the people who inhabit them that are.

No one feels more haunted than Iris Chapel, a famous artist living under a pseudonym, who’s shying away from attention and scrutiny in New Mexico. Until, that is, a mysterious letter one day forces her to look back at her childhood, as the last living daughter of the Chapel gun-manufacturing dynasty. And on the curse that picked off each of her sisters as soon as she had sex.

This example of the modern Gothic is a heated, humid one: a juicy pulp of sisterhood, puberty, desire and first love, all narrated in a hushed, floaty style that builds to a shrill whistle when the sisters meet their fates.