Will Hurley was an attractive, charming, and impressive student at Dublin’s elite St. John’s College-and Ireland’s most prolific serial killer. Having stalked his four young victims, he drowned them in the muddy waters of the Grand Canal. Sentenced to life imprisonment when he was just nineteen, Will is locked away in the city’s Central Psychiatric Hospital.

Freshman Alison Smith moved to the Big Smoke to enrol in St. John’s and soon fell hard for Will Hurley. Her world bloomed … and then imploded when Liz, her best friend, became the latest victim of the Canal Killer-and the Canal Killer turned out to be the boy who’d been sleeping in her bed. Alison fled to the Netherlands and, in ten years, has never once looked back.

When a young woman’s body is found in the Grand Canal, Garda detectives visit Will to see if he can assist them in solving what looks like a copycat killing. Instead, Will tells them he has something new to confess-but there’s only one person he’s prepared to confess it to. The last thing Alison wants is to be pulled back into the past she’s worked so hard to leave behind. Reluctantly, she returns to the city she hasn’t set foot in for more than a decade to face the man who murdered the woman she was supposed to become.

Only to discover that, until now, Will has left out the worst part of all …

Imagine the man you love being not only convicted of murder but confessing to being a serial killer including the murder of your best friend. That was the position a nineteen year old Alison found herself. Unable to handle it, she left Ireland and never looked back telling no one in her life about her dark past. While her boyfriend and love, Will, is convicted and sentenced to life. Ten years later, the killings start again. Now the police need to talk to Will but he only wants to talk to Alison. So for the first time since her world was blown apart she returns to her home and faces everything she ran from to try and find the truth.

But what is the truth and what will it coat her to find it? Catherine Ryan Howard spins a beautiful web of a story that has you searching for the truth and the twisted truth revealed at the end will shock you and leave your head spinning. I really liked this story and got through it in two days. Looking forward to more from Catherine Ryan Howard. 

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Catherine Ryan Howard was born in Cork, Ireland. Her debut novel is the thriller Distress Signals, called by the Irish Times “highly confident and accomplished, impeccably sustained, with not a false note.” She is also the author of the self-published titles Mousetrapped and Backpacked, both lighthearted memoirs of her travels abroad to the United States and Central America.