Joe McKee – pillar of the Derry community – is dead.
As the arrangements for the traditional Irish wake are made, his friends and family members are left reeling by how cancer took this much-loved man so soon.
But grief is the last thing that Joe’s daughter Ciara and step-daughter Heidi feel: they knew the real Joe, the man who was supposed to protect them and did anything but.
As the mourners gather, the police do too, with doubt being cast over whether Joe’s death was due to natural causes. Because the lies that Joe told won’t be taken to the grave after all – and the truth gives his daughters the best possible motive for killing him…
Read an extract from Claire Allan’s twisty, edge-of-your-seat thriller The Liar’s Daughter.
Prologue
Now
Joe
They’ve told me I’m dying. A doctor in a white coat, and a blue shirt with a stripy navy tie that had a coffee stain on it, had perched on the end of my bed and adopted a very serious expression on his face.
A nurse – who I had heard give out to her colleagues about the lack of resources on the ward and how she was getting ‘sick, sore and tired of working her arse off’ for too much responsibility and not enough money – had pulled the clinical blue curtain around my bed to afford me some privacy.
Her sombre expression mirrored that of the doctor, although it was clear it was a front. It was almost the end of her shift. This was a life-changing moment for me – the moment I heard I was condemned to die despite all the chemotherapy and surgery that they had been able to offer. For Katrina the nurse, with her short brown hair and ice-blue eyes, it was just the end of another shift. And she was tired. She had to do this final grim task before she clocked out and went home. She’d get a cup of tea, or coffee, or maybe a glass of wine (she seemed the type). She’d kick off her shoes and watch something mindless on the TV. She might even laugh if it was funny.
I doubted she’d think about me and the fact that I was dying. That no more could be done for me. I was already in the past tense for Katrina.
I was feeling sorry for myself, but that was allowed, wasn’t it?
I wasn’t that old. This shouldn’t have been happening yet. I didn’t deserve this.
I wanted to scream that I didn’t deserve this.
But it was like there was a tiny voice, or a chorus of voices, whispering in her ear that this is exactly what I did deserve. In fact, I deserved much, much worse.
