Fiddleback: A Novel [Paperback]

Fiddleback comprehensively demonstrates that JM Morris has all the assurance and authority of a seasoned veteran; this is a truly chilling debut.

Ruth Gemmill grows worried when her younger brother Alex stops returning her calls. He has been living in the small village of Greenwell and working as a teacher, so Ruth travels there to find out what has happened to him. She meets an intimidating wall of silence from the locals, and the growing unease the town generates in her is worsened by the blank non-cooperation of the police. The questions accumulate, but the most pressing is who is the "grey man" Alex's pupils saw him with just before he vanished. As Ruth's fears escalate, the tension is ratcheted up by the appearance of a brutal ex-lover she knew in London, a man who caused her years of pain. And as Ruth descends into this nightmare of mystery and suspicion, she comes ever closer to some terrifying revelations.

There are familiar elements here, of course, not least the suspicious, close-mouthed townsfolk. But Morris adroitly reinvents such tricks of the suspense novelist's trade and delivers a brilliantly orchestrated narrative. Morris is particularly successful in the first-person narrative chosen for the increasingly concerned Ruth: her growing psychological tension is perfectly matched by the ever-darkening trajectory of the mystery. --Barry Forshaw --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'Nightmarish... [Morrris] writes superbly about a small town's subtle gathering of menacing forces' Time Out

'...how do you describe that moment when the lights go out in someone's eyes and the darkness takes over?' When Ruth Gemmel's younger brother Alex fails to return her calls, she sets off to check up on him. Unable to find him in Grenwell, the town where he has been living and teaching, she begins her tentative enquiries. She soon discovers the locals to be frustratingly unhelpful, whilst the eerie town holds more questions than clues. Why are the police so uncooperative? Why is Greenwell so dark and lonely? And who is the 'grey man' the schoolchildren saw Alex with not long before he went missing? As Ruth becomes concerned that something terrible has happened to her brother, events escalate mysteriously, dangerously out of control. Too late, Ruth realises that her worst fears haunt her still, and that she is at the centre of a far darker nightmare than she could ever have imagined.

FIDDLEBACK is J.M. Morris's first psychological thriller. The author lives in North Yorkshire, and is currently working on a second novel.