When Dee returns from an overnight trip to London, the Oxford College Master’s Lodging is a mess: Felicity, the girl she nannies and who suffers from selective mutism has vanished. Her Danish stepmother Mariah never bonded with the girl and since she has given to her own boy, she is totally exhausted and incapable of taking care of this extraordinary 8-year-old. Felicity must have sleepwalked, something she frequently does during her nightmares which have intensified since they moved to the old spooky house. For the police, Dee is one of the prime suspects because Nick Law, Felicity’s father, is convinced of her guilt. So they interview her over several days to get an understanding of the girl’s special situation and the relationship she had with her loving nanny who could never do her any harm, could she?

Lucy Atkins’s “Magpie Lane” is a very clever and creepy novel which brilliantly conveys the atmosphere of an old, dark house where you immediately believe ghosts could wander and haunt the inhabitants. Apart from this, she has created lovely characters who are not only very peculiar but with whom you bond straightaway even though some doubt about Dee’s involvement in Felicity’s vanishing is looming over the story.

I totally adored how Atkins uses the old university town in her novel. First of all, the house itself which provides a long and spine-chilling history, but also the cemeteries and walk ways which have a lot to tell. Apart from the surrounding, the people there also seem to live in the past which is especially tricky for a modern woman like Mariah. Even though she, on the one hand, is kind of “evil stepmother”, things are not that simple. I can understand how frustrating her situation is there: she is just “the wife of”, ignored for not being a real part of the Oxford community and everything with which she normally can charm people does not work here. Additionally, the situation with Felicity is undoubtedly highly challenging for her and then, things become even more dire with her own child crying day in, day out from colic.

Even though Dee is telling the story through the police interviews, Felicity is at the centre. This girl is surely a challenge for everybody but due to Dee’s sensibility you come to love and understand her increasingly. Her nightmares and obsession with death is somehow bizarre and unnerving yet understandable when you get to know her story. My personal highlight was the character of Linklater. The eccentric historian who seems to be completely unaware of the world outside his head fits perfectly in a place like Oxford and plays an important part in creating the somehow Gothic atmosphere.

Atkins’s way of foreshadowing adds to the suspenseful atmosphere and makes it a wonderful read that I enjoyed thoroughly.

When the eight-year-old daughter of an Oxford College Master vanishes in the middle of the night, police turn to the Scottish nanny, Dee, for answers. As Dee looks back over her time in the Master's Lodging - an eerie and ancient house - a picture of a high achieving but dysfunctional family emerges: Nick, the fiercely intelligent and powerful father; his beautiful Danish wife Mariah, pregnant with their child; and the lost little girl, Felicity, almost mute, seeing ghosts, grieving her dead mother. But is Dee telling the whole story? Is her growing friendship with the eccentric house historian, Linklater, any cause for concern? And most of all, why was Felicity silent?

On paper, this sounded like a fantastic mix, the plot sounded intriguing, dark and twisting, the setting sounded claustrophobic and intense and there seemed like a quirky cast of characters. However, something did not translate into the final product and I feel a bit meh about the whole read.

Lets start with the plot, there is something about it that kept me strangely gripped however I was to be let down by the end. The plot is slow but I kept thinking there had to be something else, another twist, anything really. Instead, the plot is sorely lacking twists and I do think the ending was the lazy option and a different one could really have electrified the plot.

The setting did happen to be my favourite aspect of the book, Oxford itself portrayed beautifully with its surrounding history. The house was beautiful and full of secrets, providing the perfect backdrop for an intense atmosphere to build.

Now moving onto the characters. It is not that I did not find them to be likeable, rather I do not have any strong feelings about any of them. We get to know them up to a point but I feel like there is a lot more to them that we do not learn, especially with Nick, I think there is a whole other story there to be explored. Linklater is probably my favourite character, simply because he was interesting and brought interest to the read.

'Magpie Lane' was a promising thriller that sadly disappointed. This is unfortunately easily forgotten.

Thank you to NetGalley and Quercus Books for an advance copy.

Lucy Atkins really understands the human psyche and what drives us! This is another delicous novel where all is not as it seems, you never know who you can trust or quite where the story is going. I loved her last work and wondered if this would be as good; I'm pleased to say it is! Excellent writing.

A taught and compulsively clever psychological thriller that you can’t put down!

A live-in nanny, a dysfunctional blended family, a selectively mute little girl and the hallowed grounds of Oxford University all come together with unexpected results.
All told from Dee’s p.o.v as she is being interviewed by the police about the disseverance of her employers eight year old daughter, Felicity, this is not the fastest paced thriller or the most action packed but it is full of some great characters who are in turn endearing, comical, vile and downright despicable as well as parts of Oxford that get brought to life across the pages, it is most certainly a page turner of a book.

The whole book is brimming with tension and atmosphere as the events lead up to Felicity’s disappearance and beyond to a conclusion that you probably won’t see coming.

If you are a fan of psychological suspenses then you are in for a treat with this book.
I am a relatively slow reader but I gobbled this book up in two sittings as I just couldn’t put it down!

Magpie Lane will be published on 02 April 2020 and is available to pre-order now from your local bookshop or Amazon

A massive thank you to the author Lucy Atkins, publishers Quercus Books and NetGalley for my digital copy of the book in exchange for an honest and independent review.

A taught and compulsively clever psychological thriller that you can’t put down!

A live-in nanny, a dysfunctional blended family, a selectively mute little girl and the hallowed grounds of Oxford University all come together with unexpected results.
All told from Dee’s p.o.v as she is being interviewed by the police about the disseverance of her employers eight year old daughter, Felicity, this is not the fastest paced thriller or the most action packed but it is full of some great characters who are in turn endearing, comical, vile and downright despicable as well as parts of Oxford that get brought to life across the pages, it is most certainly a page turner of a book.

The whole book is brimming with tension and atmosphere as the events lead up to Felicity’s disappearance and beyond to a conclusion that you probably won’t see coming.

If you are a fan of psychological suspenses then you are in for a treat with this book.
I am a relatively slow reader but I gobbled this book up in two sittings as I just couldn’t put it down!

Magpie Lane will be published on 02 April 2020 and is available to pre-order now from your local bookshop or Amazon

A massive thank you to the author Lucy Atkins, publishers Quercus Books and NetGalley for my digital copy of the book in exchange for an honest and independent review.

I enjoyed this book immensely and read it over a cosy evening.

Dee is a Nanny. We are told bits of her past and left to wonder until her back story is fully revealed.

Felicity is selectively mute. I have worked with children with this condition and must commend the author on her accurate portrayal of this character. Her parents are well meaning, but ultimately do not have her best at their heart.

With myth and fairytale woven in , this story grabs you and holds on.

I wasn’t wild about the ambiguity of the ending, but it’s my personal preference for books to end ‘properly’ with well thought out explanations.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for my copy of this book.

The eight year old daughter of an Oxford College Master has gone missing. The police start to question her nanny, Dee, and through Dee’s thoughts we learn of a dysfunctional family hidden behind the facade of success.

This is an interesting and unusual book. The story is told as Dee looks back on the events leading up to Felicity’s disappearance. This isn’t a straightforward linear story but is intertwined with Dee’s thoughts on the police who are interviewing her. To begin with I found this slightly confusing but as I got into the swing of it I found that I enjoyed this unusual way of narrating a story. It is definitely worth persevering if you feel put off at the start.

I am not going to give any spoilers about this book. The reader needs to make the discoveries about the family as the story unfolds. You do need to bear in mind that everything is being told from Dee’s point of view. How much of the story is coloured by her past & her thoughts?

The story flows well & moves along at a reasonable pace without there being much real action. However even little things are of great importance to the main story. The plot is well constructed with some interesting twists and turns along the way.

I really enjoyed this unusual book. I was left with some interesting questions once I had completed it – not to do with the actual story as this was neatly sewn up. It was more to do with the rights and wrongs of what happens throughout the story.

A great book which I really enjoyed.

I received a free copy of this book via Netgalley.

The tale of a nanny who may not be what she seems has been written before, but what lifts this book above the rest is the quality of the writing and the gorgeous, atmospheric sense of place. Intriguing and unusual

I loved Atkins' 'The Night Visitor' but this one sort of fizzled out on me. There are lots of Gothic trappings but they're not really relevant to the actual story. To warm to this story you really need to engage with 8 year old Felicity and child characters are never my favourite. Structurally, this is essentially a police interview of the nanny, Dee, when Felicity disappears and her short answers to the police are followed by her memories, thoughts, and wanderings so that the tale appears in the interstices. It's not especially complicated and I found it rather transparent which is disappointing. Atkins' writing is fluent and she has a quirky approach to plotting that I like. This one didn't work over well for me but I'd still look out for what she does next.

Magpie Lane is a book that teaches you as you read. I thought I was picking up a psychological thriller/crime novel, when actually I have learnt about oxford, mathematics and more about wallpaper than I ever thought pertinent (actually fascinating stuff - did you know there’s a certain kind of toxic green wallpaper?). Books that make you feel smarter for having read them (I’m looking at you, ‘The End of Mr Y’) are some of my favourite books. Not to be confused with laborious literary tomes (those are important too), books like Magpie Lane pick at different areas of your brain, making you come alive as you read. Lucy Atkins has not written a passive experience, you are in conversation with her story throughout the whole novel. It truly is remarkable.
At no point did I know where the story was going - I could not work out the mystery of what happened to Felicity. Often when I pick up a crime/thriller novel, I expect a racy story with okay writing (probably says more about my choice of book than the genre as a whole), but Magpie Lane blew me away. It is spectacularly well written. This review sounds excessively gushy but it’s all true. I almost wish I was still studying English Lit so I could write an essay on it.
The primary setting, an interview between our protagonist and the police, is intercepted with Dee’s rambling stories of her time living and working with Nick and Mariah Law. Felicity, Nick’s daughter, has selective mutism and a penchant for curiosities (skulls, stones, witchcraft). It was brilliant to read an eight year old girl written with interests like Felicity’s - it reminded me of my little sister’s fascination with snails and woodlouse when she was tiny. We are not all sugar and spice and everything nice.

I received a copy of Magpie Lane by @lucyatkinswriter through @Netgalley for a review. Magpie Lane will be published by @quercusbooks in April 2020.

This is deliciously clever. A woman goes to look after the mute child of an Oxford professor and his second wife. She is pregnant, the wife before..well her story comes out, and what happens to the nanny and her relationship with those in the house?

From the start, the creepy overtones of this novel were deliciously delectable. There is something off, something odd from the start. You would think an Oxford man in a rich house would have his life together but there are some very strange goings on. As the nanny discovers more, there are odd questions to ask...
Then the worst happens, the child goes missing the night the nanny has been sent to see a show in London. The step mother is horrified, the husband too. But who is telling the truth and why not?


What I loved about this was the gothic overtones and the many scary visits to Graveyards! The little girl seems obsessed with the occult, ghostly friends and there is even a priesthole in her bedroom. These were holes in chimneys or hidden panels in homes where priests would hid from those who wanted any religious men killed. Henry VIII's purge of the churches added to this mytery So why is a child so keen to learn about the dead, why does she arrange her toys in a circle?

The journey to the end is well paced. The nanny is being questioned by a policemen and all the evidence seems to point to her, but then it could be the mother, the father, the child herself....so many red herrings to enjoy!

The story flashes back to the days leading up to the child going missing, the day the nanny met her employer, the history of all those in the story. Then the delicious threads of intrigue all come together.

Recommended! You won't see Oxford in quite the same way again!