Аннотация

I’m sitting on my couch, watching the local news. There’s Chloe’s parents, the mayor, the hangers on, all grouped round the pond for the ceremony. It’s ten years since Chloe and Carl drowned, and they’ve finally chosen a memorial – a stupid summerhouse. The mayor has a spade decked out in pink and white ribbon, and he’s started to dig.
You can tell from their faces that something has gone wrong. But I’m the one who knows straightaway that the mayor has found a body. And I know who it is.
This is the tale of three fourteen-year-old girls and a volatile combination of lies, jealousy and perversion that ends in tragedy. Except the tragedy is even darker and more tangled than their tight-knit community has been persuaded to believe.
Blackly funny and with a surreal edge to its portrait of a northern English town, Jenn Ashworth’s gripping novel captures the intensity of girls’ friendships and the dangers they face in a predatory adult world they think they can handle. And it shows just how far that world is willing to let sentiment get in the way of the truth.
An unforgettable tale of friendship and memory – and the shattering truth behind a forgotten dead body newly unearthed – Cold Light is a most welcome addition to the crime fiction and thriller ranks.
Cold Light by Jenn Ashworth is a hauntingly beautiful and shocking psychological thriller in the vein of the bestselling novels of Tana French – a darkly compelling story of secrets between two teenage friends in a small English town.
Ashworth already has created great buzz in the U.K. thanks to her stunning debut novel, A Kind of Intimacy, winner of the prestigious Betty Trask Award, and now Cold Light places her in elite literary company—alongside Laura Lippman, Kate Atkinson, and other acclaimed masters of intelligent, emotionally powerful mystery and suspense.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uhjpJWklNw
Review

“Hugely readable debut novel […] about the inability to know others and ourselves.”

—The Independent

“Extremely intense and powerfully intriguing.”
—Waterstone’s

“Ashworth has the rare gift of being able to make her reader feel perverse and voyeuristic, implicated somehow in the tragedy laid out on the pages.”
—Sunday Times (London)

“A grimly atmospheric mystery.”
—Sunday Express (London)

“A psychological thriller of the first order.”
—The Age (Australia)

“Another cleverly skewed tale told from the self-conscious perspective of an outsider… arrestingly observant… Ashworth’s second book confirms that the first was no one-off… her talent could take her a long way.”
—The Guardian

A wonderful tale, beautifully told.
—Bella

A chilling, blackly funny novel with a surreal edge about the intensity of teenage friendship.
—Grazia

“[Ashworth] Evokes a damaged mind with the empathy and confidence of Ruth Rendell.”
—The Times (London)