The Wicked Sister is a dark fairy tale. The Cunningham Family has retreated to the deep woods after their eldest daughter Diana was identified with a mental deviancy. The youngest daughter Rachel adores her big sis and only playmate. But the games Diana directs cross the border into her sick world.
Their parents are found dead and after several weeks missing, eleven-year-old Rachel returns certain she murdered them. She checks herself into an institution. Year later, a newspaper article comes into her hands with proof of her innocence and she checks herself out and journeys back to the cabin in the woods, seeking the truth.
Now she is leery of her older sister, living with their mother's aunt who was always easily manipulated.
Because with a clarity that is almost frightening, suddenly, I remember everything.~from The Wicked Sister by Karen DionneThe story is told in two voices by the mother and the youngest daughter, the mother's insights sharing a backstory unknown by Rachel.
It's quite a thrill ride, as dark as a Grimm's Fairy Tale. Michigan's isolated woodlands is the vivid backdrop, an environment of deep beauty and danger. Complicated family relationships are not always what they seem.
The novel shares elements of The Marsh King's Daughter in setting and with a young woman whose life is in danger.
I was given a free ebook by the publisher through Edelweiss. My review is fair and unbiased.
The Wicked Sister
by Karen Dionne
G.P. Putnam's Sons
On Sale Date: August 4, 2020
ISBN 9780735213036, 0735213038
Hardcover $27.00 USD, $36.00 CAD
from the publisher:
She thought she’d buried her past. But what if it’s been hunting her this whole time.
From the bestselling and award-winning author of The Marsh King’s Daughter comes a startling novel of psychological suspense as two generations of sisters try to unravel their tangled relationships between nature and nurture, guilt and betrayal, love and evil.
You have been cut off from society for fifteen years, shut away in a mental hospital in self-imposed exile as punishment for the terrible thing you did when you were a child.
But what if nothing about your past is as it seems?
And if you didn’t accidentally shoot and kill your mother, then whoever did is still out there. Waiting for you.
For a decade and a half, Rachel Cunningham has chosen to lock herself away in a psychiatric facility, tortured by gaps in her memory and the certainty that she is responsible for her parents’ deaths. But when she learns new details about their murders, Rachel returns, in a quest for answers, to the place where she once felt safest: her family’s sprawling log cabin in the remote forests of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula,
As Rachel begins to uncover what really happened on the day her parents were murdered, she learns—as her mother did years earlier—that home can be a place of unspeakable evil, and that the bond she shares with her sister might be the most poisonous of all.
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| Karen Dionne |
about the author:
Karen Dionne is the USA Today and #1 international bestselling author of The Marsh King’s Daughter, a psychological suspense novel set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula wilderness published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in the U.S. and in 25 other languages. Her next psychological suspense novel, The Wicked Sister, will publish August 4, 2020.
Karen has been active in the writing community for over twenty years. She co-founded the online writers community Backspace, organized the Backspace Writers Conferences in New York and the Salt Cay, Bahamas Writers Retreat, and served on the board of directors of the International Thriller Writers.
Karen enjoys nature photography and lives with her husband in Detroit’s northern suburbs.
