The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths
Elly Griffiths is best known for her detective novels, the Ruth Galloway series and the Stephens and Mephisto series, and I'm a big fan of both (reviews here). The Stranger Diaries, however, is a standalone mystery that, although it does feature a police investigation, reads to me more like a psychological thriller.
Claire Cassidy is writing a book about RM Holland, a fictional writer of ghost stories (think MR James) best known for a short story called The Stranger. She's also an English teacher at a secondary school which is partly located in what used to be Holland's house - as someone who also went to an ordinary comprehensive school that was mostly ugly and modern but a small portion of which was an old mansion house, I identified with this location quite strongly. One day her friend and colleague Ella is murdered, and at around the same time, strange notes start to appear in Claire's diary. Who is writing them, how are they getting into the house, and how are the…
Claire Cassidy is writing a book about RM Holland, a fictional writer of ghost stories (think MR James) best known for a short story called The Stranger. She's also an English teacher at a secondary school which is partly located in what used to be Holland's house - as someone who also went to an ordinary comprehensive school that was mostly ugly and modern but a small portion of which was an old mansion house, I identified with this location quite strongly. One day her friend and colleague Ella is murdered, and at around the same time, strange notes start to appear in Claire's diary. Who is writing them, how are they getting into the house, and how are the…
