The new crime thriller from the bestselling author of Her Name Was Rose
– Ask No Questions
I am very excited today to bring you all a fantastic EXCLUSIVE peek between the covers of Ask No Questions by Claire Allan. Described as ‘a twisty psychological thriller‘, it will be published with Avon Books January 21st, 2021.
Claire Allan is an International Bestselling Author from Derry in Northern Ireland with her writing receiving much praise from across the literary world –
‘A brilliantly paced, intriguingly plotted and thoroughly enjoyable story. One of the best psych thrillers
I’ve read this year.’ LIZ NUGENT
‘AMAZING. I read it in one go. I was totally hooked.’ MARIAN KEYES
‘A powerful and emotional psychological thriller that will keep you guessing and leave you breathless.‘
C. L. TAYLOR, author of The Fear
Her debut psychological thriller, Her Name Was Rose, was published in June 2018. It hit the bestseller charts in the UK, reaching #5 in the Amazon Kindle charts, and becoming a USA Today bestseller. Her next novel, Apple of My Eye, was published in January 2019 and hit the bestseller charts internationally. She has followed this up with two more novels: Forget Me Not and The Liar’s Daughter, which became a USA Today bestseller.
Please continue reading for details about the book and, of course, that ALL IMPORTANT EXCLUSIVE EXTRACT. I really do hope you enjoy. It’s a good one 😱
[ About the Book ]
Not all secrets are meant to come out…
Twenty-five years ago, on Halloween night, eight-year-old Kelly Doherty went missing while out trick
or treating with friends. Her body was found three days later, floating face down, on the banks of the Creggan Reservoir by two of her young classmates.
It was a crime that rocked Derry to the core. Journalist Ingrid Devlin is investigating – but someone
doesn’t want her to know the truth. As she digs further, Ingrid starts to realise that the Doherty family
are not as they seem. But will she expose what really happened that night before it’s too late?
[ EXTRACT ]
Prologue Ingrid
I was ten years old when I found out that monsters are real and they walk among us. I can pinpoint the exact day that everything changed, when the world I’d found to be fun and innocent and good turned into something dark and frightening.
Looking back, I pity my mother having to find the words to tell my brothers and me what had happened. I pitied all the mothers and fathers who were forced to have that same conversation with their children at the dinner table that evening.
There’d be no playing out in the street any more. Not on these dark nights. There’d be no nipping in and out of neighbours’ houses, or knocking on doors looking for a glass of water when we were parched from playing tig or Red Rover, or riding our bicycles all over the estate in and out of the dark alleyways.
We were never to go out on our own. Nor walk back from school on our own. Even though it would still be light then. We absolutely were not allowed to take the short cut through the overgrown fields at the back of the school, either.
And we were never, ever, ever to go into anyone’s house on our own. No matter how well we knew them. No matter how many times we’d been there before.
Because Kelly Doherty had been found and she was dead. And someone, some bad man or bad woman, had hurt her and killed her and our mothers didn’t know ‘how they would ever be able to cope’ if something like that happened to us.
I didn’t sleep that night. I couldn’t. For the first time, I hated that I had a room all to myself and my brothers got to share. They got to keep each other company. I curled into as tight a ball as I could manage, hugged Daisy, my tatty stuffed puppy, to me and squeezed my eyes tight shut. But every noise, every creak, every sound from the street had my imagination running wild.
I was scared to move. Scared to breathe. I prayed over and over again, channelling my earnest childhood belief in prayer and a greater good, for Jesus himself to protect me.
‘Oh, Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place all my trust in you,’ I muttered over and over and over again until I was stumbling over the words and trying to shake the image of Kelly, dead – like actually dead – from my head.
What did dead people look like? I wondered. Had she been scared?
Had she been alone? Who was the bad man? Or the bad woman?
At some stage during the long, dark night I heard voices on the street. Whispers. I couldn’t make out the words, but I guessed they could only be talking about one thing. One person. It was all everyone was talking about. It was all everyone was thinking about.
I wondered if I crept to the window, if I ducked my head through the curtains, would I be able to hear more? I slipped out from under my duvet, still grasping Daisy tightly, and tiptoed to the window. My breath was loud, heavy, misting against the cold glass. My heart thumping so fast I wondered was it possible for a ten-year-old to have an actual heart attack and die.
I almost, almost, didn’t look out of the window, but I steeled myself, took a deep breath and opened my eyes.
There was a man, dressed in black, a woollen hat pulled down over his forehead, a scarf, or jumper or something high on his neck. But I saw him, and he saw me.
He looked straight up at me, raised a gloved hand to gesture to me, to bid me to come to him, and I fell to my knees, then curled into a ball, squeezing my eyes as tightly as I could. Because monsters were real.
The bogeyman we had always been told was just make-believe stalked our streets…..
You will find Claire tweeting at @ClaireAllan
