No One Will Know, Rose Carlyle

Eve Sylvester is a young, very naive girl with a lot of tragedy in her life. Raised partly in the foster care system, she's been restlessly moving around most of her life, when a chance meeting with a young Australian man overseas leads to a yacht journey home. It's a short lived period of bliss with the love of her life, Xander, who then dies in a car accident on the way to introduce Eve to his very wealthy parents. Who were convinced their son was going to marry a much more suitable previous girlfriend, and are very sceptical when, after being released from hospital recovering from her own injuries, Eve announces she's pregnant.

Cut a long, awful story short, cut off, disbelieved, homeless and aimless, a pregnant Eve is approached at Xander's grave by an elderly woman with an unbelievable job offer. The role of nanny for a ridiculously wealthy couple who live on a secluded island off the coast of Tasmania.

The setting, needless to say, is fictional here, so the island is anything the author wants it to be. She wants it to be luxurious, remote, populated by just enough people to support a small town where staff can come and go from, and provide a mansion of a house, a detached summer house (where Eve is accommodated), a secluded harbour which sailing ships come and go from unseen, and a nearby isolated lighthouse. All of these elements feature in a story that gets, well, complicated. Eve's pregnancy proceeds, her job includes a few very hairy complications, and a few years later things become life threatening and, well more and more odd. Can't say much more than that without giving away a plot that is most certainly a wild, very wild, wierd, wild ride.

NO ONE WILL KNOW is going to work well for readers that can connect with Eve who is part naive ingénue, part annoyingly thick as a brick, brave and incredibly daft all at the same time. It's a sort of a mother's love will overcome everything story, (stand by for some twists and turns in there), which is definitely going to work well for readers open-hearted enough to understand and/or forgive her naivity, possessed of determined suspension of some hefty disbelief along the way.

This reader found it an interesting, frustrating, unexpected ride. On the one hand fast paced, intriguing and engaging. On the other, I had to restrain a physical reaction to some of the plot twists that had me eye-rolling and sighing more than a bit. There were points where I couldn't put the novel down, and there were points when I wanted to pitch it against the nearest wall. From memory, a similar reaction to the author's earlier novel, and maybe that's the point. Make things as out there as you possibly can, and see if you can engage a reader with a character whose flaws, and the mess they find themselves in, are so unlikely, that they make you suddenly think, "is it really that unlikely?" In this day and age who knows, anything's increasingly possible.