Cracked by Louise McCreesh | #blogtour #extract

Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for Cracked by Louise McCreesh. Unfortunately, my review copy was lost in the post so I was unable to read this debut novel but I do have a little teaser to share with you all today. My thanks to Jenny at Hodder for the invitation to join the tour!

Author : Louise McCreesh
Title : Cracked
Pages : 304
Publisher : Hodder & Stoughton
Publication date : August 20, 2020

| ABOUT THE BOOK |

Jennifer Nielsen has her life on track. Until she gets news that her former psychiatrist, Phillip Walton, has been brutally murdered, and that she is implicated.

Philip knew her darkest secrets. And circumstances of his murder suggest that someone else out there knows them too.

Jenny needs to speak to old friends, and old enemies, from her dark years spent at Hillside Psychiatric Hospital. Because they are the only ones who know what really happened at Hillside, about the secret that Phil kept for them all, and that this is not the first murder. 

| EXTRACT |

Before

They load the body bag into the ambulance waiting outside. It doesn’t look like a body; it’s hard to believe there’s a formerly living, breathing person inside that rough navy canvas, but I know there is. I saw it get zipped into the bag myself and am now watching the paramedics struggle under the weight as they throw it carelessly into the back, not giving any thought to the condition of the person inside. I guess that makes sense. The person inside is no longer alive. No more harm can come to them.

It feels like too much to handle. A lot of things do and I often find that gets me into trouble, although this is the most trouble it’s got me in yet. Fragile, people call me, when I know deep down that isn’t the case and I’m nowhere near as delicate as they’d like to imagine.

The truth – all of it – paints me differently. Really, I am the breaker of fragile things. Things that slip through my fingers and smash on the ground at my feet, quite simply because I can’t keep them in my grip and have a tendency to destruct if not myself then something.

Take the person in the body bag. The person no longer living. The person only dead because I broke them, and no one thought I could.

Just a little something to whet your appetite. I don’t know about you but I’m definitely intrigued!

Cracked is available to buy!

Amazon US | Amazon UK | Hive UK | Kobo | Waterstones

| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |

Louise McCreesh is a freelance journalist working in London. She is an alumnus of the Curtis Brown Creative Writing Course, where she was offered a scholarship to continue work on this novel. Cracked is her debut novel.