The Girls in the Garden by Lisa Jewell + a Giveaway

Good morning, everyone! Today I'm super excited to be a stop on the TLC blog tour for Lisa Jewell's latest, The Girls in the Garden.

Note there is a tour wide giveaway on this one, so be sure to read through to the end to enter the Rafflecopter.

Pip, Grace, and their mother are starting over. Their story not a pleasant one by any means and it's one they all hope to keep to themselves. So the move to a new neighborhood is a chance to keep their secrets and rewrite their past while moving forward.

The new place sits on a communal garden that offers safety and friendship for everyone in their small family. Kids run free, roaming the shared space, while their parents share wine and gossip. But the assumed safety and community spirit is shattered one balmy summer evening when Grace is attacked and left unconscious. For Pip, who was unfortunate enough to stumble upon her sister's bloodied body, everyone is a suspect with questionable motives. And for their mother, the wait for Grace to awaken is an agony no mother should ever suffer.

There are essentially two mysteries in Lisa Jewell's latest, at least for the reader. First, who attacked Grace? Second, what are Clare and her kids running from?

The book begins with the attack: the aftermath of the summer party, Clare passing out, and Pip's awful discovery. But then the story goes back to Clare's arrival at Virginia Park, introducing both the family and the reader to the neighbors one by one. There's the homeschooled family of girls and their possibly overly friendly parents. There's the absent mother and her feral ringleader of a daughter. There's the handsome teen crush with the special needs brother...

Each and every one of them is a potential suspect in the reader's eye. It's as though you're waiting throughout the tale for a bomb to drop, for the attacker's (or attackers') identity to be revealed via a sly word or a salacious look observed almost unnoticed by the various narrators.

This waiting and careful attention to potential clues makes The Girls in the Garden an incredibly tense read. Definitely a favorite of mine this summer!

Rating: 5/5

And now for the giveaway. As mentioned this is a tour wide one, so you'll only need to enter on one blog to get your name in the hat.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

To see more stops on the tour be sure to check out the official TLC tour page here.

For more on Lisa Jewell and her work you can visit her website here. You can also like her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter.

Purchase Links: Amazon | Books a Million | Barnes & Noble