Should You Ask Me

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What to expect

'I've come about the bodies. I know who they are.'

Just before D-Day in 1944, on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, an elderly woman walks into a police station. She has information, she says, about human remains recently discovered nearby.

The bodies could have stayed buried for ever - like the pain and passion that put them there. But Mary Holmes is finally ready to tell the truth.

The young constable sent to take her statement is still suffering from the injuries that ended his army career. As he tries to make sense of her tale, William finds himself increasingly distracted. Mary's confession forces his own violent memories to the surface - betrayals and regrets as badly healed as his war wounds.

Over six days, as pressure builds for the final push in Europe, two lives reveal their secrets. Should You Ask Me is a captivating story about people at their worst and best: raw, rich, and utterly compelling.

(P)2017 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Critics Review

  • Charming, gleeful, a delight…brings Britain at war to vivid life

    Guinevere Glasfurd, author of The Words in my Hand
  • An intriguing and atmospheric novel, cleverly interweaving different times and crimes through an elderly and most unreliable narrator…absorbing

    Amanda Craig, author of The Lie of the Land
  • Vivid and brilliantly gripping. I was captivated from the first page.

    Esther Freud, author of Hideous Kinky
  • Intriguing… Just when you think there is no way to draw all the threads to a satisfying close, Marianne Kavanagh does it.

    Woman
  • An unputdownable combination of thriller and psychological drama

    Emma Thompson
  • Kavanagh is a perceptive and vivid writer and this tale of ordinary lives transformed by extraordinary events has so much period atmosphere, you can practically hear the air-raid sirens.

    Daily Mail

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