Title: Skin Deep
Expected publication: 5 April 2018
My Rating: 🌟🌟1/2
Book Description:
'Once I had cleared the bottles away and washed the blood
off the floor, I needed to get out of the flat.'
Cordelia Russell has been living on the Côte d'Azur for ten years, posing as a posh English woman fallen on hard times. But her luck is running out.
Desperate to escape her grotty flat and grim reality, Cordelia spends a night at a glittering party. Surrounded by the young, beautiful and privileged she feels her age and her poverty.
As dawn breaks she stumbles home through the back streets. Even before she opens her door she can hear the flies buzzing. It hasn't taken long for the corpse in her bedroom to commence decomposing ...
Liz Nugent's novel is the dark, twisted and shocking story of what takes Cordelia from an island childhood in Ireland to ruins in Nice.
Cordelia Russell has been living on the Côte d'Azur for ten years, posing as a posh English woman fallen on hard times. But her luck is running out.
Desperate to escape her grotty flat and grim reality, Cordelia spends a night at a glittering party. Surrounded by the young, beautiful and privileged she feels her age and her poverty.
As dawn breaks she stumbles home through the back streets. Even before she opens her door she can hear the flies buzzing. It hasn't taken long for the corpse in her bedroom to commence decomposing ...
Liz Nugent's novel is the dark, twisted and shocking story of what takes Cordelia from an island childhood in Ireland to ruins in Nice.
My musings:
Skin Deep starts with a death (no spoilers here, it’s
literally the first page), and the reader soon becomes aware that there is
something slightly off about Delia O’Flaherty, the female character narrating
the story. And it’s not just the fact that she is leaving a body behind in her
flat in Nice as she goes out trying to clear her head and come up with a plan
of how to best dispose of it. It was all very, very intriguing, and I soon felt
myself getting sucked into the story. Who can resist a mysterious character
embroiled in a violent death at the start of a mystery? Well, lovers of crime
fiction will surely know what I mean!
After the first chapter, the story jumps back in time to
Delia’s childhood on a remote island off the West coast of Ireland renowned for
inbreeding and madness. And Delia’s upbringing certainly isn’t normal. As her
father’s favourite, she has learned at an early age to use her beauty to scheme
and plot in order to get her way, without caring about the consequences of her
behaviour on others. Every life she touches, however briefly, will be
irrevocably altered – unfortunately never for the better!
Liz Nugent certainly knows how to create a sociopathic
character that burns through the pages like a fireball of destruction (an apt
comparison, which you will find out if you read the book). I initially found
myself intrigued, then disturbed, and at one point in the book so disgusted by
her actions that any empathy I may have felt for this character vanished in a
puff of smoke. There was a definite turning point in the story for me, from a
kind of morbid fascination to one of outright horror. To say that it disturbed
and depressed me is an understatement – some of its images haunted me in my
worst nightmares. Perhaps the graphic images in my mind come from a background
of seeing such tragedy in real life in my job, which created visuals I did not
want to follow me into my sleep. Or perhaps it is parenthood that altered me to
the point where I could not get over this one particular event in the book
without feeling sickened to the very pit of my stomach. Whatever the reason, I
admit that I would have gladly abandoned the book at this point if I had not
invested so much time in it already. Delia was not the only dislikeable
character in this somewhat bleak tale, but certainly the one who created the
most destruction in her wake. All in all, the images created in my mind were
bleak, depressing and disturbing. Kudos to the author for evoking such a
visceral reaction, but sadly it marred any pleasure I may have gained from
reading the rest of the story.
Summary:
Skin Deep is a powerful, sinister and disturbing character study of a
narcissistic, sociopathic protagonist that will appeal to readers who don’t
mind their characters dark and unlikeable. Nugent’s writing is engaging and
soon manages to draw you into the action. There is an unexpected twist at the
end that should please mystery lovers, even though its circumstances just add
to the overall tragedy of the story. Personally, I found some of the themes too
disturbing for my liking and concede that I am obviously not the right audience
for this book.
Thank
you to Netgalley and Penguin Books UK for the free electronic copy of this novel and
for giving me the opportunity to provide an honest review.
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