What She Knew (47 page)

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Gilly’s Ten Favorite Page-Turners

Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow
—Peter Høeg

This book is so good that I almost wish I hadn’t read it, because I can’t ever again experience the utter thrill of discovering it. It has everything: it’s thoughtful and intelligent; the prose is rich and evocative from the very first sentence to the last; and both the plot and the characters (especially outsider-turned-detective Miss Smilla) are complex and intriguing, and embedded in a setting that feels vivid and chilling, in both senses of the word. This was the first contemporary psychological thriller I ever read, and I was instantly hooked on the genre.

No Country for Old Men
—Cormac McCarthy

This book grips me by the throat every time I open it. Extraordinarily well written in prose that is lyrical and sparing yet tremendously powerful, this is an absolute masterpiece of a book. Not a word is wasted, yet the picture of shattered lives that’s painted is as realistic and gripping as you can get, and the plot is a vortex you desperately want the characters to be able to extricate themselves from.

The Secret History
—Donna Tartt

A perfect mystery story. Ingredients: an East Coast American college setting, a group of privileged, refined students, an outsider desperate to get in with them, and a murder. Throw in large doses of intrigue, beautiful prose, and characters you end up knowing so well they feel like your roommates. What more could you want?

Black and Blue
—Ian Rankin

In my view, this is one of the best Rebus books, but they’re all fantastic. It has the usual Rankin cocktail of great characters; superb Edinburgh setting; some of the most realistic dialogue in the business; deadpan, perfectly placed prose; and a high-stakes, twisty-turny plot to keep you devouring the story right until the end. Rankin’s Rebus books have a kind of rhythm and fatalism to them that I find irresistible.

The Tin Roof Blowdown
—James Lee Burke

This book is hard-hitting and unflinching yet poetic at times, and a powerful humanity hangs from every word of it. All of James Lee Burke’s powers are at their mightiest in this incredible Dave Robicheaux thriller set in a vivid and terrifying New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Gone Girl
—Gillian Flynn

Clever, stylish writing, sensationally well structured, and with a shocking twist that I didn’t see coming. The disappearance of a wife from her picture-perfect marriage reveals more than you could possibly have imagined. Unputdownable.

The Ice Princess
—Camilla Läckberg

Camilla Läckberg’s brilliantly drawn lead character sucked me right into this book. She’s a feisty, curious, clever girl determined to get to the bottom of a mystery in a small Swedish coastal town. It’s another one of those books where location, characters, plot, and good writing all combine to make you race through the book to find out “whodunit.”

The Lovely Bones
—Alice Sebold

I was completely gripped by this compulsive story from the start. The narrative, in the voice of a murdered fourteen-year-old girl, is carefully and compulsively rendered. Her tale is horrific yet hauntingly ordinary too in its depiction of both her family’s grief and her murderer’s sinister suburban existence. This is one to make you shudder.

Faithful Place
—Tana French

This is my favorite title in Tana French’s Dublin series. She has a talent for superb plotting, funny, über-realistic dialogue, and keen social observation. I loved Detective Frank Mackey, who is the lead character in this one, and his crazy family, who leap right off the page.

No Time for Goodbye
—Linwood Barclay

This book’s disarmingly simple premise sucked me right in and kept me going: it’s a domestic nightmare of a situation, which you would never want to find yourself in, but can imagine all too easily.

About the author

Meet Gilly Macmillan

G
ILLY
M
ACMILLAN
grew up in Swindon, Wiltshire, in the UK and spent a few years living in Northern California in her late teens after her family relocated to Menlo Park. She returned to the UK to study History of Art at Bristol University and then did an MA in Modern British Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. After a short time working in commercial galleries in London, Gilly got her dream starter-job in the editorial department of
The Burlington Magazine
and then worked in the Exhibitions Department of the Hayward Gallery before starting a family.

Since then, Gilly has been a full-time mom and a part-time photographer and photography lecturer. Nowadays she sometimes accompanies her son to the set of the BBC TV show
Call the Midwife,
where he’s a member of the regular cast, but she mostly writes whenever she can.

Gilly lives in Bristol with her husband, three children, and two dogs. This is her first novel.

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CREDITS

Cover design by Amanda Kain
Cover photograph © by Michael Whelan/Gallery Stock

COPYRIGHT

A trade paperback edition of this book was published in 2015 by Hachette UK

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

WHAT SHE KNEW
. Copyright © 2016 by Gilly Macmillan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST WILLIAM MORROW EDITION PUBLISHED 2015.

ISBN 978-0-06-241386-4

EPub Edition DECEMBER 2015 ISBN 9780062413871

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