Messy and complicated..overly so. I made it 50% and just gave up caring what happened.. I have read other books by Erin Kelly and very much enjoyed them. I won't let this one off stop me from reading more of her work in the future.

There’s a lot going on in this book: Upcoming 50th anniversary of a sensational child book containing a special treasure hunt, obsessed treasure hunters called Bonehunters, a bunch fanatics harassing the book author’s family, a huge media coverage, two interwoven dysfunctional families and their so messed up members!

This book is ultra complex, messy, intelligent reading requests your entire focus and attention because you keep moving back and forth between different timelines to collect entire pieces of puzzle for truly understanding the bigger picture!

There are so many characters and so much is going at the same time. Don’t get stressed out because of long pages! Pacing is quite fast and intriguing! You don’t have time for getting bored but you get exhausted after trying to absorb so much details about events and huge bunch of characters including their interesting back stories. You don’t want to miss anything because any detail the author has implicated is important!

The Golden Bones was published in 1971 and it was the most ambitious, expensive picture book ever made. One night an art student who lost his way and was about to get enlisted, stopping by the room of another art student he has been fancied for a long time. The lost man’s name was Frank and his beautiful muse was Cora. At that very same night, Cora played him a record called “ Gather the Bones” which gave him inspiration to create the entire book, artwork and riddle game based on the song lyrics which were also based on a true story of a woman named Elinore. That very same woman lived in English countryside unhappily married heroine took a lover, Tam; upon discovering the affair, Elinore's husband murdered her and scattered her bones throughout the countryside. A passing witch casted a spell allowing Tam to resurrect Elinore if he could piece her skeleton back together to prove his love. Tam spent the next seven years gathering his dead lover's bones and arranging them on his bed.

After the treasure hunt game which was based on Elinore’s story became a huge sensation, hopeless art student Frank turns into Sir Frank Churcher leading his readers to seven sites where jewels were buried: one by one, tiny golden bones were dug up until only Elinore’s pelvis remained hidden.

For 50 years nobody has found where Elinore’s pelvis hidden.

Frank and Cora got married and Cora gave birth to their daughter Eleanor who preferred to be called Nell. Poor girl was attacked by paranoid schizophrenic fan of the treasure hunt named Ingrid who thought by tearing Eleanor’s pelvis apart with a knife would help her to resuscitate Elinore! Terrorized young Eleanor barely survived from the attack and Ingrid got institutionalized but there were still her devoted followers ( one of them is Stuart) kept harassing Eleanor to mess with her life.

Now that very dysfunctional family: the adulterer Frank, very narcissistic Cora, their next door neighbors/ long time friends/ also in laws ( their children were married with each other) and their children, grandchildren gather all together at family estate where the documentary crew filming their entire celebration. Frank and Cora’s son Dom is about to lunch the application of treasure hunt he’s been working during pandemic ( it nearly took 3 years of work) And Frank plans to reveal the whereabouts of the missing golden bone!

Eleanor doesn’t want to get involved in Golden Bones business, rejecting the money her family can provide her, turning into a recluse, reluctantly joining the family gathering with her 15 years adopted daughter. But she sees Stuart lurking around, a mysterious person starts dropping clues on fan boards about her secrets. And it seems like there are serious problems about application’s lunching. Eleanor/ Nell has every right to get frighten because all hell breaks loose and things get out of control!

Overall: it was smart, well developed mystery! It’s worth to get exhausted!

Special thanks to NetGalley and Hachette Book Group/ Hodder & Stoughton for sharing this digital reviewer copy with me in exchange my honest thoughts.

I really just thought this book was a lot of fun. A treasure hunt? Stained glass artistry? Found family? Topical awful old men? Consent issues? Narrowboats? Online communities? Count me in: it sounded like a lot and it was but it sort of worked and I didn’t think there were any loose threads.

I feel like I'm about to write a Dear John letter. Like, "Dear book...it's not you, it's me."

My favorite part of this book was the whole idea of the hunt. I actually wished there was more about the actual hunt itself.

But holy hells, there are SO many timelines. I had so much trouble telling when we were in the book. And SO many characters. Aside from our messy, messy family, there are cops and boyfriends and children of boyfriends and treasure hunters and stalkers and crazies and waitresses and every single one of them appears to be somewhat important to the story. I got so that I didn't really know who belonged to the family and who didn't. It also didn't help that there was Eleanor who was sometimes Nell who was sometimes a child and sometimes not (depending on timeline) and there was Elinore who is NOT Eleanor and who is sometimes a fictional character and sometimes a golden skeleton. There are also 3 unimportant children, one of whom (very young) is only memorable because he loves to run around naked.

And as I said above, the family is messy. Messy and toxic and precious and pretentious and each and ever one of them needed to go.

I liked Eleanor (Nell) not Elinore enough that I was interested in her story and I mostly loved Billie, but the story was messy enough that I honestly was more confused than anything.

3 stars because I liked the idea of it and a couple characters, but I'm not so sure I'd try the author again.

The Skeleton Key” has already been acknowledged in the UK as a best thriller/mystery of 2022 and deservedly so. It was released on Kindle Unlimited for subscribers in the US in September, and the hardcover will be finally available in January. Don’t miss this!

It’s a highly original story: imagine your author dad used your mother as the model for an illustrated puzzle book/treasure hunt. It’s based on a grisly fairy tale/folk song about a woman, Elinore, dismembered by her jealous husband, her bones scattered around Britain. Her lover, Tam, believes if he finds all the bones, she will be resurrected. Mom and Dad also fashioned a tiny golden and bejeweled skeleton that they took apart and buried across the country. The clues to the locations are in the book, “The Golden Bones.” Six of the seven troves were found; the final piece, the pelvis, stays hidden. Flash forward: the couple has a daughter named Eleanor, her mom’s doppelgänger. The book has a cult following and “The Bonehunters” are still looking for that pelvis. When Eleanor was fourteen, a deranged Bonehunter decided that the missing “golden pelvis” was inside the teenager, and attacked her in an attempt to remove her hips. Yeesh.

Flash forward again and it’s the 50th anniversary of the book. Eleanor is now in her mid-forties, works as a glass artist, is known as “Nell,” has a teenage stepdaughter, and is invited back for “celebration” of the book, which is being accompanied by the launch of a new virtual treasure hunt and television coverage of the “reveal.” Her younger brother Dom is the app developer. The grand prize? The missing golden pelvis. Again, the crazies (some now in their 70s) revive their twisted quest after years of stalking the family. At the parents’ house is also Dom’s young teenage daughter, Aiofe, another Elinore clone. And, of course, everything goes wrong with relaunch.

I was addicted immediately. It’s a fairly long book (545 pages), but the intricate story kept moving at a fast pace. It’s centered around Nell’s viewpoint and you feel her trauma as she reconnects with a family she tried to escape. 5 stars for an incredible thriller!

Thank you to Hodder & Stoughton/ Hachette Book Group and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review!

Literary Pet Peeve Checklist:
Green Eyes (only 2% of the real world, yet it seems like 90% of all fictional females): YES That would be Rose.
Horticultural Faux Pas (plants out of season or growing zones, like daffodils in autumn or bougainvillea in Alaska): NO A rose garden, however, flourishes with an unusual fertilizer.

The formatting of the kindle arc made it hard to read. Though I assume this would be fixed for the final book.

I really like the addition of the map and family tree.

I found this book very interesting and fun to read. I loved the characters and all the plot twists. From the very beginning I was intrigued to know more about what was going on

What drew me in to The Skeleton Key were a) the cover of the book, which seemed to promise both magic and ordinary life and b) the fact that it was built around a book. In this case, a treasure hunt book that's now 50 years old, involves a quest to re-assemble a skeleton, has a world-wide, obsessive fan base, and has shaped the lives of two close families—one the author/illustrator's, the other his best friend's.

Erin Kelly has structured this novel brilliantly, switching back and forth in time, doling out crucial pieces of information at regular intervals, but never revealing the full story until the novel's conclusion. Normally, this might have been a DNF title for me because it's much more about family dynamics than about a book and the magic it creates, but Kelly kept me hooked.

The narrative voice alternates between omniscient and first-person, and in the first-person sections the voice we hear is that of Nell, short for Eleanor, the daughter of the author/illustrator. The book's skeletal heroine is Elinore, so not surprisingly Nell has been hounded her entire life by "boneheads," individuals attempting to solve the book's puzzles and locate the jeweled bones associated with them. Early on readers learn that, as a child, Nell was attacked by a bonehead who was convinced the removing a bone from the body of the living Nell/Eleanor would somehow complete the quest set up in the book.

The Skeleton Key spins out in multiple directions and readers come to see deep, often disturbing, links among the two central families and immense character flaws in each of these individuals. If you enjoy books drenched in suspense with characters you can never quite be certain of, you're going to love reading The Skeleton Key. I found that to be true—even though the novel wasn't as bookish as I'd hoped when I began reading.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.

Do you remember Kit William's Masquerade? It was a beautiful children's book that contained rhymes and riddles that would leave seekers to an actual treasure! Like everyone else years ago, I was completely entranced.

The Skeleton Key has taken this idea and adapted it to our own modern electronic world. Nell is the daughter of the famous author of the Golden Bones - a picture book leading to a treasure published 50 years ago and. still unsolved. Her life has been negatively impacted as some of the fans of the book have transformed into fanatics and actually endanger her in their zest to solve the mystery.

Nell has returned to the family mansion for the 50th anniversary of the book. There is a unique cast of characters that shed light on the mysteries of why her parents act in the manner they do as well as what drives many of the other characters in the story. For me, this book could have been 2 novels - there is an awful lot there. But on the other hand,. I loved every minute of it!

If you dream of hidden treasure, love an English Mystery or just want to read a unique mystery thriller, The Skeleton Key is for you!



#Hachette

#TheSkeletonKey #NetGalley Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this novel. Really solid read.

I wanted to like this but found the mystery to not be that enticing and I wanted more from this. The overall thrilling aspects were... less than desired.