Review: Fear in the Sunlight

Fear in the Sunlight by Nicola Upson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This novel is a wonderful blending of fact and fiction as Upson takes real people, Josephine Tey and Alfred Hitchcock, and works them into a complex web of betrayals and secrets within a fictional family. The mystery in this novel is a tangle of secrets and identities that kept the pages turning rapidly.

Josephine Tey is the central character in Upson's series. In real life Josephine Tey was the pseudonym of a Scottish writer not known to have had any romantic relationships, with men or women. Upson has created a complex woman whose various entanglements add depth, and often contrast, to the mystery story being told.

"The sun emerged from behind a rare cloud, and Marta watched as the stain of light spread across the hills, transforming each shade of green into a sharper, more intense version of itself. There was no point in saying anything more: it was an argument they had had many times before and would no doubt have again, part of the settling of two lives into one, so she finished her cigarette in silence and got back into the car." (p. 46-7)

I am counting this book toward the Read Harder Challenge in the category of "a book about someone that identifies as LGBTQ." In the 1930s (when the story is set) I don't think the term existed, but there are relationships that are central to this story among several women that today would be identified as LGBTQ.