The Long Weekend

Hazel Ladd has spent her whole life hiding the love she feels for one of her daughters and disguising the hatred she feels for the other.

She wondered why it didn’t hurt more. Surely the guilt alone should have her crawling, with bloody knees, on the sand?

After fifteen years apart, they all meet up for a long weekend. Hazel’s guilty secret is finally torn from her and the long-anticipated family reunion ends in disaster, with chilling results.

The novel is set against the haunting backdrop of a wintry Norfolk coastline and a remote lighthouse that overlooks the bleak North Sea. Making sandcastles has never been so dangerous in this dark, creepy and multi-layered mystery, where nothing is what it seems and whose troubled female protagonist starts to lose her grip on reality, putting her family’s lives in danger. This is a disturbing portrayal of a deeply complex mother, whose longed-for family reunion with her two estranged daughters goes horribly wrong.

All she’d ever tried to do was protect her daughters from the truth...

The Long Weekend explores the theme of maternal love and how the ‘sins of the mother’ affect the daughters. It also focuses on how dysfunctional patterns repeat across generations. Jane E. James weaves gothic and supernatural elements through her novel to create a truly chilling read that will appeal particularly to fans of mystery novels.