Siobhan MacDonald

Twisted River Siobhan MacDonald

In this twisty debut psychological thriller, two families agree to a holiday house swap, each wife hoping a vacation will help her troubled marriage. But then a woman is murdered in the driveway of one house in an apparently random attack, and the secrets holding each marriage together start to come to light, with shocking consequences. Limerick, Ireland. The driveway of the Stokes family home. American Oscar Harvey opens the trunk of the car his hosts have loaned him and finds in it the body of a woman beaten and bloody. But let's start from the beginning. Kate and Mannix Stokes and their children live beside Curragower Falls in Limerick, in a house they love but can barely afford in post-recession Ireland. On top of that, their autistic son Fergus is being bullied at school, and their daughter Izzy blames herself for not being able to protect him. What her family needs, Kate decides, is a vacation. With Mannix back at work, they can just afford it. So when she sees a beautiful Manhattan apartment on a house swap website, it seems like a dream come true. Oscar and his wife, Hazel, live with their two children in a gorgeous apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Though outwardly a successful, happy couple, Hazel has mysterious bruises, and Oscar is hiding some secrets of his own at his dental practice. They too need a vacation, and Hazel has long wanted to take her children back to her native Limerick. The house swap seems like the perfect solution; both Kate and Hazel hope a week away will sooth their troubled marriages. But this is anything but an ideal vacation, and the body in the trunk is only the beginning.