The Poison Tree: the addictive , twisty debut psychological thriller from the million-copy bestselling author

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Filming this course was a new challenge for the CBC team as we had to be socially distanced. What was your favourite part of creating and filming the course? Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival. Paul was led into a life of crime by his boyhood protector, a bully named Daniel; but one night, what started as a petty theft turned into a grisly murder. Now, at nineteen, Paul must bear witness against his friend to avoid prison. Louisa's own dark secrets led her to flee a desperate infatuation gone wrong many years before. Now she spends her days steeped in history, renovating the grounds of a crumbling Elizabethan garden. But her fragile peace is shattered when she meets Paul; he's the spitting image of the one person she never thought she'd see again. Most of us have flirted with dangerous situations or people during our college or young adult years, but few pay the price that Karen does. What inspired her story?

Quite a few members chose to borrow her next novel which suggests that they wanted more and there was also interest shown in her first novel The Poison Tree, which I have read a couple of times and rate very highly. Despite the slow build-up, Kelly makes it very clear that nothing good can come from these dynamics. And whilst I did predict a major part of the “twist” (I read A LOT of these mysteries), I was still invested to watch the slow descend into disaster as both Karen and Rex act as if remote-controlled by Biba’s destructive hand. I love a good character study, and the way poor Karen gets drawn into the Capel siblings’ world was well executed. I related to some of Karen’s fascination with the Capel’s lives – “straight A student falls for more exciting personalities” is a theme that really does play out in real life. A wonderful premise for a novel that is part character study and part domestic thriller and will undoubtedly stun some readers with its twist. What can Paul even do, run for his (and Louisa's) life as fast as he could and make sure Louisa survives the impending explosion. He makes it. She's alive. Or at least till that point. Louisa readily agrees. Anything to save her life, and to save the secret she has been hiding all these years. But as soon as Carl left, they sat and thought through it. Who's to say he'll stop at this. Who's to say he won't return to end their life once he got what he always wanted?The first time I read The Poison Tree is one of my strongest and most enduring reading memories. It was an unseasonably hot day in April 2011, and I got through almost all of it in a few hours while sat on a grassy bank in a park near my old sixth form college. Both setting and weather seemed a perfect fit for Erin Kelly's debut, which brims with heady nostalgia.

At one point in the novel, Karen turns the tables on Alison Larch, a television journalist she suspects of investigating Rex, and interrogates her on her current roster of work. In what other ways did you draw upon your own experiences as a journalist? On the other hand, as soon as Louisa sees Paul returning she panics, as there are Adam's stuff lying around and she doesn't want Paul to see them and realize that Louisa loved him due to his resemblance with Adam. What does Louisa do, collect them at one place and burn that down. Why is she hiding? Or more like WHAT is she hiding? We don't know. She has this weird ritual now and then, where she gets herself drunk and watches Adam's videos and listens to his songs and cries. Clearly he's dead, but why is she doing all of this? We don't know.Daniel is quiet. Without any friends. And Paul soon realises Daniel has knowledge but he is an illiterate. He can't read or write. So they make a deal. Paul will be helping him manage his life being an illiterate, and Daniel will be his bodyguard, watching out for him whenever he is in trouble. He gets defensive when she tried to pry into his life, and STILL expects her to be goody two shoes girlfriend, why? A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. She has been working as a journalist since 1998, writing for newspapers, magazines including Red, Psychologies, Marie Claire and Elle, as well as writing psychological thrillers.

These two, scarred and solitary, begin a secret affair. Louisa starts to believe she can again find the happiness she had given up on. But neither of them can outrun his violent past. And like we all guessed, that hits the nerve, it was as good as the person handing himself over to him in a silver platter. But, he didn't know he was doing that. He didn't know in another second, with just a stroke, he would lose his life by a weatherpane which the guy in front of him was holding. The old man, Ken Hillyard, dies. Just like that. In the present, Rex and Karen try to make a life together on the outside. Karen has passed off Alice, Biba’s baby, as her and Rex’s daughter for ten years and doesn’t wish to tell Rex the truth now. He continues to believe that Alice is his daughter. Karen, meanwhile, is receiving mysterious phone calls from someone who just hangs up, and she is paranoid that the press will find out who Rex is and begin to hound them again. Rex has changed his name to get away from his past, and all they want is to live a normal life. From an incredible new voice in psychological suspense, a novel about the secrets that remain after a final bohemian summer of excess turns deadly.And all this time Paul was simply gaping at him, didn't try stopping him fearing he'd get caught in the camera. But that doesn't happen. Louisa was more upset than be happy. Upset and scared, that he might be searching her for some revenge? And also that she spent 20 years of her life crying about someone who had been alive all this time. in the spectrum of "books that claim to be just like secret history" this one takes home high marks. I liked the ending more this time, too; it might be a bit far-fetched but it's certainly cathartic.

Also, I didn't feel that the was a "psychological" build up for the "genre" that this book was placed in was as strong as either her last book or what I would expect from the genre. Also, her timing fell flat to me. It just really seemed to "stumble" around. Not only did characters jump around, but the timeline did as well. This can work, and I have read numerous books where the author has done this type of format masterfully, but this one did not work. I usually find my research enraging rather than upsetting, and I let that power me through the writing. Once the research is done, though, I don’t let the subject matter get to me otherwise I’d end up writing a polemic, not a thriller. The threat to my own wellbeing is far more likely to come from my own plot holes than anything else. I’m a master at painting myself into corners. This proved to be another highly effective psychological thriller from Erin Kelly in which a woman is haunted by a difficult relationship from her late teenage years that still impacts upon the present some twenty years later. Then she meets Paul, who comes to work on the garden restoration project that she is overseeing while he is waiting to testify in a murder trial. Their relationship develops quite organically as both are outsiders and troubled by the secrets they hold. I would classify this novel as a mystery/romance as the main drive of the novel was in finding out the central mysteries of the characters, namely what Daniel had done to cause Paul to have to testify, and why exactly Louisa is afraid of being spotted in certain areas of London. This book would also be good for those that like a character-driven plot.So we come to the present. Knowing just that Paul is treated as a witness and not as an accomplice to the murder, which murder you ask, yes, I'll get to that. And he'll be getting sent to some place in the meantime until the Trial starts, and that place is where Louisa works, and also hides herself from the world.