Blog tour: Day of the Accident, by Nuala Ellwood

What would you do if you woke up, your life was destroyed… and you had no memory of what went wrong?

That very spooky premise is where Day of the Accident starts, and sweeps us along on a rollercoaster ride with twists, turns and dark secrets galore. By the end, I wasn’t sure who to believe- so the final twist of the rug from out underneath my feet was especially satisfying.

Our heroine is Maggie, who wakes up from a coma to learn that she was in a car accident… and that her daughter, Elspeth, has died. She’s missed the funeral. Her husband has gone missing. Her house has been sold on, and their bank account has been cleared. Her life as she knows it is over, and she has no idea why. It’s gripping, and we know about as much as Maggie.

Though it starts slowly, Day of the Accident is a slow-burner that gradually ratchets up the tension with every page as Maggie hunts for answers, and as her gradually-returning memories lay a trail of breadcrumbs for the reader. There are so many different strands to this plot, and you don’t actually know how they connect until the very last page, where everything falls spectacularly into place. Ellwood is a master at drip-feeding you just enough information to think you know what’s going on- and then completely flipping the script, leaving you dazed.

As far as characters go, Maggie is the person we get to know best: though she slowly makes friends with the village doctor and her social worker, we spend a lot of time alone with the heroine, adding to a real sense of dislocation and loneliness. You really feel the guilt and devastation that she’s going through, which makes the final pages in particular especially hard to read. Paired with the child’s letters scattered through the book- by whom? Maggie? Elspeth?- it makes for compelling reading, and an even more compelling mystery.

Dark, slick and superbly tense, Day of the Accident is the next thriller you should be reading.

So that’s my review- but what did everybody else think? Find out in the rest of the blog tour below…