Book Review

Daisy Darker: An ingeniously structured mystery fails to amount to much more

Reading Alice Feeney’s fifth novel feels more like solving an equation or following a game than delving into a story

Alice Feeney: her fifth novel Daisy Darker will be a satisfactory read for plot hounds, people who come to stories for impressive mechanics and firework endings

At one point in Alice Feeney’s fifth novel Daisy Darker, our eponymous protagonist tells us that for lack of real-life companions her “childhood friends were Agatha Christie and Stephen King”. It’s an unsubtle nod to the prevailing influences behind this book, backed up later by a reference to Christie’s classic 1939 novel And Then There Were None. Daisy Darker pays homage to that bestselling mystery by also featuring a group of characters in a house ...