Magpie Lane

"When we spoke to Lucy Atkins about what makes a great thriller , she explained that suspense, when done well, is “powered by oddness and creepiness and things that are just a bit off and unsettling.” When I started reading Magpie Lane , I could see exactly what she was getting at. The book is set in Oxford, at the lodgings of the new Master of one of the colleges. The Master’s Scandinavian wife is busy renovating the house, including whitewashing the floorboards (which I loved, because the dark wood panelling always got me down when I was a student in Oxford). Again, I’m not going to reveal anything, but this book is probably in the domestic noir genre of crime fiction, though at the glamorous end. These are books where I slightly see my own life mirrored—grappling with parenthood and a household, loving work but being over-busy as a result and scared of losing track of what’s important while being over-obsessive about other things. The other book I read in that genre and really enjoyed was Stop at Nothing , by Tammy Cohen, who did an interview with us on the best psychological thrillers ."

"This book has a crime at its heart, but I wouldn’t call it a crime novel. It’s got almost exactly the same setup as Close to Home , in that a young girl goes missing. It’s also set in Oxford but it’s quite a different world from the one in which Daisy Mason disappears in Close to Home . Magpie Lane takes place in an academic setting. It’s set in an ancient college—I think it’s Corpus Christi, though it’s not called that in the book—and the child who goes missing is the daughter of the Master. He and his slightly erratic second wife live in the marvellous old Master’s Lodgings with lots of cubbyholes and secret places where odd things start happening. There’s a very spooky frisson to the whole thing. It’s beautifully done. Lucy Atkins writes like an angel. She takes a lot of time on her books, and you can really see where the love and effort has gone. In this book, she reminds me of AS Byatt , who’s one of my all-time favourite writers. You feel the layers in the book, the density. It’s packed with ideas, with observations. And it’s a mystery as well. You want to know what happened. Where is the girl? What happened to her? I’m not going to spoil that. The other thing is that Lucy Atkins really knows her Oxford. There are so many lovely little nuggets about the city that just get sprinkled in here and there but don’t get in the way—things I didn’t know. It’s a real joy to read—the city really breathes through the book. It’s wonderful. I recommend it very highly. Yes, it’s exactly that, and Magpie Lane does it beautifully. The setting is so strong— both the city and the house. Like in a Charles Dickens novel , the setting is one of the characters. Yes, it’s one of those books that stays in your head. I read a lot of books and sometimes I can’t remember a single thing about them. That’s not the case with Magpie Lane."