Published 11th December 2021 by Code Grey Publishing.
From the cover of the book:
SOMEONE IS DYING.EVERYONE IS LYING.
Glamorous Cara De Rosa has it all: a successful and rapidly expanding chain of family-run Italian restaurants, friends aplenty, and an imminent marriage to a much younger man.
When she collapses during a family party, all signs point to a heart attack. But Cara knows better.
Someone wants Cara dead.
Granddaughter Sienna already knows what it’s like to want answers. This time she’s determined to get them.
Because at De Rosa’s, someone needs to pay.
After graduating as an alumna of the Faber Academy, A.J. Campbell published her debut novel Leave Well Alone in August 2020, which became an Amazon bestseller. Readers who received a pre-release copy described it as ‘a gripping story with a killer twist’.
She draws her inspiration from many facets of everyday life and especially how challenging events impact us all in different ways. The human mind and how different people react to each other and interact in society fascinate her. Asking, ‘How can that have possibly happened?’ she immerses myself in developing threads, plotting and letting her creative energy help her characters evolve.
Reading or writing, she loves nothing more than settling down with a good story. She enjoy most genres, and especially novels that are thought-provoking and beg the question - what would I have done in that situation?
She lives on the Essex / Hertfordshire border with her husband, two of her three sons and her cocker spaniel, Max.
Glamorous Cara De Rosa has it all: a successful and rapidly expanding chain of family-run Italian restaurants, friends aplenty, and an imminent marriage to a much younger man.
When she collapses during a family party, all signs point to a heart attack. But Cara knows better.
Someone wants Cara dead.
Granddaughter Sienna already knows what it’s like to want answers. This time she’s determined to get them.
Because at De Rosa’s, someone needs to pay.
***********************
Cara De Rosa is a woman who seems to have it all. Head of an expanding chain of family-run Italian restaurants, with her finger on the pulse of the lives of all her family members right down to her beloved great-granddaughter Lola, she seems to have been blessed with the kind of driving ambition and boundless energy that would put any woman of more tender years to shame, and she is more than a match for her younger fiance.
When Cara collapses during a lavish family party, the doctors are sure she has had heart attack, even if she does not seem to be responding to their treatment plan, but Cara suspects that this is not an illness brought on by natural causes - she is convinced someone wants her dead. As Cara's health begins to deteriorate, she turns to the only person she can trust to get to the bottom of what is happening - her granddaughter Sienna, Lola's mother.
Sienna knows exactly what it is like to search for answers to difficult questions, but the secrets the gravely ill Cara has entrusted her with seem a little confused. Is there really a murderer at work here, or are they both being paranoid? The only way to find out is to delve into the vipers' nest that makes up lives of their nearest and dearest...
Search No Further is an absolute scorcher of a psychological thriller that hooks you right from the start and keeps you very busy with a stream of the most delicious twists, turns and shocking revelations all the way through. It starts in the very best of ways with an intricate family drama, full of the kind of simmering sibling rivalry, suspicion and jealousy that any soap opera would be proud of, dialled up to the max by fiery Italian temperaments. Cara has kept them on a tight rein as head of the family, but they all seem to have secrets that are begging to be discovered, and as her grip on them begins to slip the lies begin to show.
Playing detective is the seemingly fragile Sienna, who is finding it difficult to move on from the accidental death of her husband some years ago, even though she has a beautiful daughter and a new man in her life. Starting with a few jumbled clues from Cara, the woman who has kept her together through her trauma, it is up to Sienna to solve the mystery of her Nonna's decline, and she needs to do it fast - fortunately she has a few friends in useful places to help her along the way, because what she discovers sets her reeling. I liked Sienna from the start - she sticks to her task with fierce determination, and finds a way to regain control over her own life while solving this mystery, even though much of what she discovers turns her life upside-down.
The pacing of this story is spot on, and once I had started it I could not put it down until all the beautifully conceived threads, filled with multiple blind alleys and red herrings, had played out to reveal the many dark secrets at the heart of the De Rosa family. I think I suspected just about every single person of dirty deeds her, except little Lola, and every time I thought I had this worked out, there was another little entertaining little twist to knock me sideways again.
This is an absolutely cracking little thriller, and I loved every single, page-turning second of it. I definitely need to go back and absorb Campbell's previous books, because this was a brilliant read!
Search No Further is available to buy now in ebook and paperback from your favourite book retailer.
Thank you to A.J. Campbell for sending me an ecopy of this book, in return for an honest review.
About the author:
She draws her inspiration from many facets of everyday life and especially how challenging events impact us all in different ways. The human mind and how different people react to each other and interact in society fascinate her. Asking, ‘How can that have possibly happened?’ she immerses myself in developing threads, plotting and letting her creative energy help her characters evolve.
Reading or writing, she loves nothing more than settling down with a good story. She enjoy most genres, and especially novels that are thought-provoking and beg the question - what would I have done in that situation?
She lives on the Essex / Hertfordshire border with her husband, two of her three sons and her cocker spaniel, Max.
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