Thriller set in OREGON

10th July 2021

The Beach House by Beverley Jones, thriller set in Oregon.

Can you ever escape your past?

Grace has bowled up on the coast of Oregon and is building the beach house in the small community of Lookout Beach, a house that is a streamlined nod to modernism and Bauhaus and frankly sounds amazing. There she will live with her little family, to wit her husband Elias (who is a successful architect in his own right) and their young daughter, Tilly. It’s not quite finished and as the novel opens, she arrives at the house to find a body and some items that are oh, so familiar to her – simple they may, some rope and some ribbon etc, but to her they are shorthand.

As a teenager in South Wales Grace was known under a different name and as an adult she escaped to the Pacific Northwest after she was implicated in a crime.  She has kept her past well hidden, even from her husband, Elias. If she has anything to do with it, the status quo will not change.

Over the past few years, she has gone to extraordinary lengths to re-invent herself, keeping her head down. She knows full well who might have left the warning message in her house. How can she continue to keep her identity and her past under wraps? Grace wasn’t a particulalry pleasant person back then, nor has she developed endearing qualities now but she has sufficiently impressed her neighbours and become an accepted part of the community. The author really gets the sense of a woman, born and raised in Wales, who is sliding under the radar in her attempts to blend in, she manages her americanisation process very well.

This is very snappy storytelling, it is well paced and there is an extra frisson because the novel is set around Halloween, which of course is highly celebrated by the Americans. There are twists and turns and the novel concludes with a plot and motive debriefing. The backdrop of the Pacific Northwest is dramatic and well portrayed.

Tina for the TripFiction Team

Catch Beverley on Twitter Insta

Join Team TripFiction on Social Media:

Twitter (@TripFiction), Facebook (@TripFiction.Literarywanderlust), YouTube (TripFiction #Literarywanderlust), Instagram (@TripFiction) and Pinterest (@TripFiction)

Subscribe to future blog posts