The Stranger Diaries

Elly Griffiths has written two other series of books that are probably better known in Great Britain than here, The "Ruth Galloway" series and the "Brighton Mysteries." This was her first stand-alone crime novel although she has since published a second book (Postscript Murders) featuring the detective in this book, Harbinder Kaur. The setting is a down-at-the-heels town in West Sussex,where the main factory has closed down and remains abandoned--and possibly haunted, according to locals--at the edge of town, right behind the the small estate houses where high school English teacher, Clare Cassidy, lives with her 15-year-old daughter, Georgie. The school where Clare teaches (based on an actual school that supposedly has a haunted staircase, West Dean College) is built on the estate of deceased gothic story writer R.M. Holland and Clare is in the process of writing a biography of him and teaches his most famous gothic ghost story, "The Stranger," as part of her creative writing class. The eerie atmosphere kicks off when Clare's colleague and gal pal, Ella, is found stabbed to death in her home with a post-it note beside her bearing a quote from "The Stranger."  DS Kaur--of east Indian descent, single, living with her parents, and still in the closet about being gay--is sent to start investigating. Clare decides to keep quiet about an affair between the head of the English department, Rick Lewis, and her friend Ella; we find out later that a friend of Georgie's, Patrick, had a crush on Ella and even stalked her in an amateurish fashion. There are suspects and red herrings enough to keep you guessing, and I never guessed who did it. The story is very atmospheric, characters are well-developed and revealed through their actions, diaries, and their own internal musings. Georgie and Harbinder share the focus as story tellers in alternating chapters. 

A more detailed review and plotline is available from The New York Journal of Books, which characterized the book as "ambitious, evocative, and thoroughly tantalizing ... more than a little unsettling—as all good hauntings should be."   Publishers Weekly says, "Griffiths weaves a tale replete with ghosts, the occult, forbidden desire, and murder." And Kirkus calls it an "immensely pleasurable" read for lovers of British mysteries.