🎉🎉🎉 HAPPY PUBLICATION DAY TO TINA BAKER 🎉🎉🎉 Nasty Little Cuts is out today !!!
Massive thank you to the lovely people at Viper Books for my advanced e-copy that I received through Netgalley.
The Blurb
WHO WILL SURVIVE THE NIGHT?
A nightmare jolts Debs awake. She leaves the kids tucked up in their beds and goes downstairs. There’s a man in her kitchen, holding a knife. But it’s not an intruder. This is her husband Marc, the father of her children. A man she no longer recognises.
Once their differences were what drew them together, what turned them on. Him, the ex-army officer from a good family. Her, the fitness instructor who grew up over a pub. But now these differences grate to the point of drawing blood. Marc screams in his sleep. And Debs hardly knows the person she’s become, or why she lets him hurt her.
Neither of them is completely innocent. Neither is totally guilty. Marc is taller, stronger, and more vicious, haunted by a war he can’t forget. But he has no idea what Debs is capable of when her children’s lives are at stake…
A powerful exploration of a relationship built on passion, poisoned by secrets and violence. Perfect for readers of Blood Orange and Big Little Lies.
What Did I Think?
I thought Call Me Mummy, Baker’s debut novel was a messed up read, little did I expect her follow up to be even more so.
On the outside, Debs and Marc have an ideal marriage, two adorable children, both parents doing what they do well but no one knows what happens behind closed doors right? No one really knows what has made the relationship what it is when Marc appears in the kitchen armed with a knife in the middle of the night. Seriously – what the hell?!?
The events in the kitchen are very unnerving. Marc’s limited communication is intrinsic to rattling my nerves and making what is playing out before me very uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure how this would play out before me but I really needed to know!
In-between the chapters in the kitchen (which are messed up), Baker puts together the jigsaw of the history of Deb and Marc’s relationship from their meeting to some rather more dark entries in their plotted history. Some of these darker flashbacks don’t bode well for the present, but the present seems to have a different balance of power between this couple.
In the writing of Nasty Little Cuts, Baker has managed ride the psychological wave she started in Call Me Mummy and has curated another messed up relationship which could oh-so-easily be playing out in your neighbours house. She’s found the knack of taking the nature of human relationships and making one heck of twisted mess which what a thrill to read.
Who Is Tina Baker?
Tina Baker was brought up in a caravan after her mother, a fairground traveller, fell pregnant by a window cleaner. After leaving the bright lights of Coalville, she came to London and worked as a journalist and broadcaster for thirty years. She’s probably best known as a television critic for the BBC and GMTV. Call Me Mummy is Tina’s first novel.
A Knight's Reads 