Speak of the Devil
A Novel
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Seven women, inextricably linked by one man, must figure out which of them killed him in order to protect one another in this electrifying debut thriller.
New Year’s Eve, 1999.
Seven women are gathered in a hotel room at midnight; a man's head sits in the center of the floor. They all had a motive to kill Jamie Spellman. They all swear they didn't. But in order to protect one another, they have to find out who did.
The ex, who drowns her darkest secret in a hip flask as the woman she loves drifts further away.
The wife, living out her fairytale marriage in a house tucked into woods so thick no one can hear a scream.
The widow, praying to a past she no longer knows whether she can trust.
The teenager, whose wide-eyed crush has trapped her in an unrecognizable future.
The mother figure, battling nature versus nurture under the weight of her own guilt.
The friend, forced to choose sides over and over, until she learns the price of choosing wrong.
And the journalist, who brought them all together—but underestimated how far one of them would go to keep believing the story they’d been told.
Against the ticking clock of a murder investigation, each woman’s secret is brought to light as the connections between them converge to reveal a killer. Marking the debut of an extraordinary new talent, Rose Wilding's Speak of the Devil explores the roles into which women are cast in the lives of terrible men…and the fallout when they refuse to play pretend for one moment longer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wilding debuts with a wickedly clever feminist thriller about the murder of a corrupt womanizer. On New Year's Eve 1999, in Newcastle, England, seven women sit in a seedy hotel, having answered a terse message: "Meet in the usual place tonight, 7 p.m. Emergency." In the center of the room is Jamie Spellman's severed head, which has stained the stack of bibles it sits on red with blood. The bible on top is opened to Leviticus 24:19: "An eye for an eye." Each of the women knew Spellman, and each maintains their innocence in his murder, but at least one of them has put this gruesome relic on display. Was it widowed Maureen Jones, mysterious Sarah Smith, librarian Olive Farrugia, teenager Josie Kitchen, journalist Kaysha Jackson, chemist Ana Maria Cortês, or Jamie's wife, Sadia? And, for that matter, what do each of those women have in common? Newcastle Det. Insp. Nova Stokoe is assigned to find out. Alternating viewpoints among the seven women and Sotkoe, Wilding charts how each woman's path crossed with Jamie's, and the mechanisms with which he abused each one's trust, friendship, dreams, and bodies. With sure-footed prose, Wilding nimbly constructs a captivating treatise on revenge and exploitation that rumbles with deep, bracing anger. She's a writer to watch.
