Her Perfect Family

Product Information

When Ella Longfield overhears two attractive young men flirting with teenage girls on a train, she thinks nothing of it—until she realises they are fresh out of prison and her maternal instinct is put on high alert.

Addressed in green ink on yellowish parchment with a purple seal, they are swiftly confiscated by his grisly aunt and uncle. Random House presents the audiobook edition of Ikigai by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles, read by Noako Mori. I flew through this book; I think it’s the fastest I’ve read one in a while (the dates don’t do it justice as I started at 23. He is being a good dad and should be proud of his wife and not concerned that she earns more than him!

Covering crime for so long, she was deeply moved by the impact on the relatives, the friends and the witnesses and it is those ripples she explores now in her darker fiction. When two young boys are brutally murdered in their tight-knit village community, Megan slowly begins to realise the signs all point to the lovable local primary school teacher: her husband. Gemma is a working mum who often feels pulled in all directions and I completely identify with that! When a single night with Frenchman Luc Valentin ends in a pregnancy Shari Lacey thinks she’ll never see the cool Frenchman again. During her long career as a journalist, Teresa worked for newspapers, magazines and television, including 15 years presenting the BBC TV news programme Spotlight.

The fig tree is there, too, when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, when the teenagers vanish. At some point I realised that while following a different person each chapter, it was only one character that was in first person. The final line of the ending chapter made me roll my eyes so far back into my head, I thought I went blind. The book is written from several points of view — the mother, the private investigator (PI Matthew Hill is my personal favourite and DI Melanie Sanders), the father, the daughter, all with their own stories to tell.Seventeen-year-old Tarryn is dabbling in a seedy online world; her older brother, Eli, has dropped out of college and refuses to tell his parents why; and Thomas and Viv have their own secrets that began as harmless fun and relief from the pressures of everyday life, but have grown into something darker and more dangerous. Driscoll does an excellent job of casting suspense onto all the characters, and I truly didn’t know which way it was going to go for a good long while.