Skin Deep – Liz Nugent

About the Book:

‘I could probably have been an actress.
It is not difficult to pretend to be somebody else.
Isn’t that what I’ve been doing for most of my life?’

Cordelia Russell has been living on the French Riviera for twenty-five years, passing herself off as an English socialite. But her luck, and the kindness of strangers, have run out.

The arrival of a visitor from her distant past shocks Cordelia. She reacts violently to the intrusion and flees her flat to spend a drunken night at a glittering party. As dawn breaks she stumbles home through the back streets. Even before she opens her door she can hear the flies buzzing. She did not expect the corpse inside to start decomposing quite so quickly . . .

My Review:  Skin Deep is Liz Nugent’s third stand-alone psychological thriller and boy is it dark.  In fact when thinking about what to write in my review every adjective begins with a D, so apologies but here are my thoughts.

Damn, this book is deliciously dark, disturbing and in parts depressing.  With a really despicable and dislikeable protagonist Delia describing her damaged life, dreary childhood and how she ended up with a dead man in her apartment, this book kept me turning those pages, devouring each chapter.

It is always a risk to write a book with such a horrible main character in case the reader doesn’t connect or empathise, but Delia is such a fascinating and damaged individual that I was immediately hooked and intrigued by her story.

I absolutely loved all the other characters personal chapters which were interspersed throughout the book, giving another layer to this story.  Another superb book by Liz Nugent.

About the Author: Liz Nugent worked as a stage manager in theatres in Ireland and toured internationally before writing extensively for radio and television drama.

Unravelling Oliver and Lying in Wait have both been number 1 bestselling and award-winning novels.
In October 2017, Liz won the Irish Tatler Woman of the Year Award in Literature.

Skin Deep was published in April 2018.

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