The book is set on the island of Capri so it has the summer gothic feel that I love, where everything is so bright and sunny but there's an undercurrent of threat and something sinister. I loved the setting and could picture it perfectly.
The main characters are Helen and Lorna. Helen is the daughter of the Lingate family. Her dad and uncle, Richard and Marcus, have a lot of money and are very rich and influential. Thirty years ago, on Capri at the villa they always stay at, Helen's mother Sarah, a famous playwright, fell over a cliff and was killed. The family maintains that it was an accident, but Helen, who was a small child at the time, has always had her doubts. Her father and uncle - and Marcus' wife, Naomi, who drinks too much and takes a lot of prescription drugs - keep her on a really tight leash. She went to college but had a driver and so on; she's never been free.
She's determined to make things happen, so she's looped in Lorna, who is Marcus' assistant, to help. Pretty soon in the book the reader knows that Lorna has disappeared, but not exactly why. But as soon as the family arrive on Capri they run into an old friend, who was on the island the day Sarah died, and there's something for Helen too - a present. It turns out to be the necklace that Sarah was wearing when she died.
A ton of things happen and it did get slightly confusing in places, and there are quite a lot of people involved, but I liked the story and the setting. I thought it had a good ending, too. I'm giving it four out of five.
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