I saw this in the Heathrow bookstore, but since I was running low on pounds, I decided to just note it down and read it later. Well, it’s later and I’ve read the book.

The Stranger Diaries is a crime novel set in the English countryside. Clare Cassidy lives a fairly uneventful life as a teacher and single mother, journalling everything in her diary and trying to write a biography of the author R.M. Holland, who used to own the school she teaches in. But when her best friend, Ella, is found murdered, Clare opens up her diary and finds words written by an unfamiliar hand:

“Hallo, Clare. You don’t know me.”

Another death follows and Clare quickly becomes convinced that the stranger writing in her diaries and Ella’s killer is one and the same. But what can she do? And what does this have to do with R.M. Holland and his famous short story, The Stranger?

I was expecting this to be one of those stories where the past influences the present (the dual-storyline type of mystery), especially given that Clare ‘found’ R.M. Holland’s lost letters at the start of the book, but was pleasantly surprised that it was not. There is a story within a story, but it’s more to do with how the killer is using the texts than a mystery hidden within the text itself.

But even though the story is firmly situated in the present, with no chance of a mystery in the past, there’s still a wonderful sense of atmosphere. The setting was immediately recognisable as the British countryside to me and I liked how the school/old house of R.M. Holland anchored the story.

As for characters, the story is narrated by Clare, her daughter Georgia, and DS Kaur, making them the three central characters. Clare, I liked almost immediately, Georgia was a generally likeable teenager, but DS Kaur made a bad first impression on me. I wasn’t too fond of how, when her POV appeared for the first time, we were immediately introduced to the fact that she was judging Clare and that Clare was very beautiful. It reminded me of those stories where the protagonist thinks she’s ordinary but everyone else thinks she’s drop-dead beautiful. However, DS Kaur grew on me despite the bad first impression and by the time the story ends, I liked her as a character. It was nice to see how her friendship with Clare developed past those bad first impressions she had of Clare.

I generally enjoyed the story, but Clare’s fascination with The Stranger and R.M. Holland was the one thing I didn’t quite understand. The story was pretty interesting but I didn’t really feel like it was something that would endure (then again, I’m not a literary fiction type of person so what do I know?). And it was a bit odd to me that someone who wrote only one short story and was otherwise quite obscure would be famous enough to be the subject of a biography. I know that Clare hadn’t sold the story yet, but she did get on TV for her work on it, which implies that R.M. Holland was at least somewhat well known. His literary merit is one mystery that the book leaves unsolved.

Overall, I enjoyed this! Despite my criticisms of R.M. Holland and his literary worth, I generally liked how the plot integrated his short story into the mystery and I really enjoyed the growth of all three main characters over the course of the novel. This is definitely worth a look for mystery fans.

Featured Image: Photo from Canva Library