If something has been covered up for eighty years, someone, somewhere, knows why…

I was intrigued by the premise of this book and was happy to accept a copy to review, but I was surprised as the story began and didn’t seem to be about a day by the pool, but instead focused on a mystery from 1940.

What’s it about?

When Nicole and her fiancé, Dan, visit a boutique hotel in the Lake District, it’s meant to be a treat: a Christmas gift from her future in-laws. However, during World War Two, the site housed a boarding school for evacuated children and, although Nicole is initially just surprised to discover a letter hidden inside a library book, she’s surprisingly shaken when she reads its contents.

Eight-year-old Peter Slaithwaite wrote to his parents describing a miserable life and asking to come home, but the letter was clearly never sent. Why?

Meanwhile, Nicole, who has never fully dealt with the loss of her younger brother as a child, is immediately on Peter’s side and urgently needs to know who hurt him and what happened to him. She hopes the answers will bring her peace, but instead they may just tear her life apart…

What’s it like?

This is a firmly contemporary story, despite the mystery element from WW2. As Nicole’s investigation progresses, she repeatedly has to choose between her instinct to investigate and everyone else advising her not to rock the boat. Her sister-in-law-to-be is one kind of nightmare and her father-in-law-to-be is another!

Meanwhile, Nicole has job issues, difficult developments in her own family and the burden of other people’s hopes to manage. How she manages these complex loyalties is perhaps more the point than the mystery plot, though this gradually evolves into a more Machiavellian – and plain strange! – set up than she could ever have first imagined.

Although we do find out what happened in the past, Fraser is more interested in how these events have shaped characters lives than in the tiny details of the events themselves. Tragedy happens but there is no detailed dwelling on the tragic moments themselves; the true tragedy, Fraser shows us clearly, is the impact on the survivors.

Final thoughts

Initially poor Nicole seemed like a bad luck magnet and I felt that she was getting a raw deal; by the end of the novel, she is no less unlucky but seems to be a stronger character and the story feels resolved – then Fraser shifts the kaleidoscope and I was left feeling a little disappointed, as this seemed to undermine some of the previous moral authority Nicole held.

However, this concern aside, ‘That Day by the Pool’ is a character-focused, contemporary tale that explores one way of exorcising your demons and ultimately focuses on the final of its three straplines:

A childhood tragedy
An 80-year old mystery
A chance to start again

‘That Day By The Pool’,
Giles Fraser,
2026, Troubador, paperback
Many thanks to the publisher and Anne Cater’s Random Things Tours for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review and a spot on the blog tour.

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