I’m not sure how I feel about this one still. I liked it while I was reading it but I found it very forgettable. I did really like the characters and the story line.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for this review copy in exchange for an honest opinion. Review has been posted on Amazon.

I wasn't able to read this book because life has been extremely busy, so I will rate this 5 stars to compensate. The blurb looked very promising though, and I will read this when I get the chance and I will edit my review

I really liked this one a lot! I was a big fan of her book He Said She Said and was excited to read this one as the synopsis read like the book and treasure hunt The Secret by Byron Preiss but with bones instead of jewels! And with family secrets! I loved the twists and turns and how this one progressed. Will highly recommend

The Skeleton Key was almost a non finish for me. I could not embrace the families - they were largely unlikeable.
While the writing is lyrical and poetic, it did not grab me and I ended up having a hard time following the plot and the whole Golden Key premise. I was able to get through it, but not my favorite.
Thankful for the ARC !

I really enjoyed this, it took me a lot longer to get through then I had wanted. At times it was hard to keep up with all the information and what was going on. Really good story and kept you intrigued.

This is just a good, fun romp. The author sets up an unusual and intriguing situation, adds some dysfunctional family members, and lets them loose. There are no life truths or revelations in these pages. It is pure entertainment of a high quality.

Immersive and entertaining. A recommended purchase for collections where mysteries and thrillers are popular.

Many Thanks to Netgalley for this book.

This story follows two families who have been interwoven with each other for decades. Frank and Lal are best friends and together with Cora, Franks wife, they create a scavenger hunt called The Golden Bone. Frank hide 7 bones and over the years only 6 were found after his daughter Eleanor was attacked by a crazy Bonehunter named Ingrid. After Eleanor, aka Nell, was attacked Frank tried to distance himself with The Golden Bone and created a series of paintings of women that people believed that he had slept with. On the 50th anniversary of the book Frank decides to finally reveal where Elinore's pelvis has been hidden, but when Frank's grandson goes up into the tree at the family home they end up finding a real human pelvis. Told through past and present points of view we discover how a simple treasure hunt transformed generations of families and caused a chain of events that ended with murder and Frank and Lal getting arrested. Nell is now in her forties and has ward named Billie that she met and has been raising since Billie was twelve. Frank is a narcissistic man who is obsessed with one upping Lal and even commits the ultimate betrayal and sleeps with Lal's daughter Rose and gets her pregnant and pays for her to get an abortion. Rose ends up marrying Domenic, Frank and Cora's son. On the night that Frank unveiled his paintings years earlier. when Nell and Domenic were teenagers, Frank was being blackmailed by the daughter of the man who was killed trying to find Elinore's pelvis. Cora, believing her to be another one of Frank's conquests, kills her with a bottle of champagne and Dom helps her get rid of the body since he knows his father is the true cause of what his mother had done. Dom plots to frame Frank for the murder of the daughter because the families hate him for all the things he's done over the years. Nell finds out the truth and Lal, after being released, finds out the truth too. Nell goes to talk to Frank in prison trying to get him released and instead he kills himself in his cell after learning that everyone now knows what he did to Rose. Nell leaves her family after learning the truth and tries to make things right about the girl that Cora and Dom killed. Nell buries her properly and even gives Elinore's jeweled pelvis to an art collector who has been after it for years. With Frank's death The Golden Bones is put to rest and the two families can once again be at peace even with the missing family members.

This had a lot of promise, but the pacing was way off to me and I was so bored by about 30% in when nothing had really happened. I skipped ahead and it looked like there was some actual plot surprises but it wasn’t enough for me.

Did I shamelessly wait to read this book till October because it had skeletons! I sure did, but I’m not proud of it 🙈 THE SKELETON KEY is a genre blend of creepy thriller and a dysfunctional family drama. It’s a story of buried family secrets, and the toll it takes on their belief. The dramatic part is the story is loosely based off a folk lore about a woman whose bones where scattered around Britain by her husband, the clues to where the bones might be hidden are written in a book! The fanatic swarm the story, try to piece the bone puzzle literally and stir things up within the family. Although some parts of the story were predictable, I thought this was an original thriller. Usually I’m only creeped up by serial killer procedural thrillers, this being borderline dismemberment creeped me much more! So if you are reading this now, don’t wait till Halloween to read this, pick it up now!

Thank you publisher via Netgalley for the gifted earc!

Eleanor Churcher has spent her whole life trying to outrun the bone hunt that her parents had written into a book "The Golden Bones" which features a woman named Elinore whose bones were scattered and must be put back together again in order to return to her true love. Gold bones were indeed scattered around by her parents with clues hidden in the book. However, the Bonehunter community eventually turned to the real Eleanor and believed the last bone was the one in her body. Now, on the fiftieth anniversary of "The Golden Bones" Nell has returned home with her family for an anniversary celebration where her father is going to reveal the final missing golden bone to put together the fictional Elinore. However, when it's time for the reveal, a very real human bone appears instead of the golden bone. The Churcher family is sent into a frenzy with a real skeleton in the closet, a missing gold bone and decades of family secrets revealed.

The Skeleton Key is a complex mystery with interesting characters and a plot that keeps building. With a storyline that moves back and forth through time and from the points of view of many different characters, I was kept on my toes with the mystery of the missing golden bone, the Churcher's history and the potential suspects. I was entranced by the entire Churcher family and how their life seemed like a fairy tale from the outside, but was cracked and tearing the family apart from the inside. It was interesting to see how the different family members dealt with living in such a prominent and sought after family, as well as how they dealt with the renewed interest and investigation surrounding the real skeleton. With an interesting twist and unexpected ending, The Skeleton Key offers a mystery wrapped in a mystery with a cast of amazing characters.

This book was received for free in return for an honest review.

I really tried with this one, but I had to DNF around 40%. It moved more slowly than I expected. I'd pick it up, then put it down, then pick it up again. But after reading for hours straight, I hadn't made as much progress as I felt I should have, and the pacing was a bit slow for the original premise of the plot for me. I'm sure this will find it's audience, and I hope it does, the summary is great. I just didn't care enough about the mystery to keep going.

This was a really fast paced story that deals with family and obsessions. The characters were intriguing with their quirks and the twists and turns made me stay up way too late.

What happens when the history of your family wasn't really what you though it was? What happens when as an adult, secrets come rushing out and change everything you thought you knew? In this twisted book, Nell realizes the happy idyll she thought she had experienced growing up may have been the concocted reality by every adult she trusted. As the truth of her father's story and the final quest come to light, so much more is brought along with it. Can Nell survive the truth? Is the truth better than the lies? This is a mystery wrapped up in dysfunctional family drama from the author of Broadchurch, and it is a book you won't be able to put down once you start it!

I have to be honest.

I read this book over two months ago and I can’t remember a single detail about it. So take this review how you will.

I remember I liked the writing. I was intrigued by the premise. I have a vague sense that I was invested at the beginning but quickly lost interest as the plot moved along. I rated it 3 stars so I must not have hated it.

That’s all I’ve got.

The way Erin Kelly writes stands out from many. It's smooth like butter, prose-like in a way that leaves you hungry for more. I was thoroughly intrigued reading through the synopsis when requesting this ARC. The stunning cover caught my eye but the description stood out; it was unlike many other mystery novels I'd read before.
All in all, while I would recommend this book to my patrons, the characters left me hanging. I couldn't relate to them, and I found that as I read, I didn't much care for any of them. While the story itself was peculiar and weird --the good kind of weird--it took a while for me to be hooked in and curious as to what would happen next. The first half of the novel was oddly slow and tedious.
I look forward to reading more of Kelly in the future.

he Skeleton Key” has already been acknowledged in the UK as a best thriller/mystery of 2022 and deservedly so. It was released on Kindle Unlimited for subscribers in the US in September, and the hardcover will be finally available in January. Don’t miss this!

It’s a highly original story: imagine your author dad used your mother as the model for an illustrated puzzle book/treasure hunt. It’s based on a grisly fairy tale/folk song about a woman, Elinore, dismembered by her jealous husband, her bones scattered around Britain. Her lover, Tam, believes if he finds all the bones, she will be resurrected. Mom and Dad also fashioned a tiny golden and bejeweled skeleton that they took apart and buried across the country. The clues to the locations are in the book, “The Golden Bones.” Six of the seven troves were found; the final piece, the pelvis, stays hidden. Flash forward: the couple has a daughter named Eleanor, her mom’s doppelgänger. The book has a cult following and “The Bonehunters” are still looking for that pelvis. When Eleanor was fourteen, a deranged Bonehunter decided that the missing “golden pelvis” was inside the teenager, and attacked her in an attempt to remove her hips. Yeesh.

The Skeleton Key starts with a children's book. The authors hid small bits of a fake, bejeweled skeleton at seven landmarks to fit the puzzles hidden in the story, and the riddles hidden within led to a cultish following of clue solvers and treasure hunters. In the 1990s, some of these self-titled bonehunters clamoring after the final, missing piece zeroed in on the authors' daughter, Nell Churcher, as a result of some increasingly wild clue interpretations that convinced them her real skeleton hid the last piece. Teenaged Nell barely escaped a violent attack, and now she wants nothing to do with her family's famous secret. It's 2021, fifty years after the book was first published, and the Churcher family resuscitates the old mystery with a new, digital component. Nell refuses to participate, but she's present as her family-- and the intertwined Lally family next door-- wrap up being filmed in a documentary about the book and its legacy. Nell's father and his best friend, Lal, have promised a big reveal. When they dramatically unveil the location of the last, never found "bone," a real human bone is uncovered in its place, kicking off a murder investigation, a media circus, and a bonehunter frenzy.

Throughout the story, the Churcher-Lally extended family's decades of drama are unpacked in increasingly weighty flashbacks. This isn't a whodunnit with an amateur sleuth. It's about a woman watching her family implode under the weight of all its secrets as they're dug up at this anniversary gone wrong. It's also not exactly a spine-tingling, check that you locked all your doors periodically, thriller. But there's a feeling of being chased and cornered by rabid fans through Nell's understandable paranoia. Through her flashbacks, we dig deeper into the layers of her distrust and her desperation to keep a low profile.

The flashbacks draw in more and more POVs from the two families as the story unravels, getting lengthier and more detailed as key dramatic moments lend clarity to the problems in the present. The mystery pulled the wool over my eyes in a key matter (which I love), but it's a long-winded reveal and one that takes a dark turn. The secret you expect to be most damning (murder) is far from it (not that I'm trying to rank evils here). Of all the nefarious goings on, it was hardest for me to stomach, though the author tried to handle it with compassion. Another moment isn't exactly a twist but involves a surprise arrival that made me literally gasp.

My favorite part of the book was Nell's relationship with Billie, her 15-year-old surrogate daughter. I appreciated Nell's support and thoughtful parenting of Billie in balance with all she still has to learn about the teenager and about parenting in general. It's not perfect, but it's loving. I also liked that it's the central relationship plot with no romance flitting through in the present to take the limelight. It was also cool to see how Nell and Billie live on a narrowboat on the London canals and less cool to see them navigate Billie's government-appointed social worker and absentee father. It makes for a complex picture beyond the central mystery.

While I appreciated the found mother/daughter bond and the elements of surprise, a few parts did make me uneasy despite the author's best efforts. I also felt that even though the biggest reveals come in the last quarter of the book, it was also the slowest moving part of the story as long-form flashbacks take over to try and obscure the real leads in a heap of motives and opportunities. While effective in a sense, the level of detail weighed down the pace and felt like a different story unto itself despite its obvious purpose.

In the end, I was satisfied in some aspects and left with some disappointment in others. I think that's a fine way to tie up a mystery, but sometimes it's hard to separate if the feeling stems from the intended, messy dynamics of a family drama or from my dislike of certain parts of the story. Either way, it's a gripping read with plenty of feints and hidden undercurrents to keep readers on their toes. Thanks to Hodder and Stoughton for my copy to read and review!

"Flesh will spoil and blood will spill but true love never dies. Gather the lady's bones with love to see the lady rise."

A few months back, I was listening to an episode of the podcast Criminal. In this podcast, Phoebe Judge discusses a children's book called Masquerade by Kit Williams. The story resulted in a real life treasure hunt which readers could participate in and find an actual prize - an 18 karat gold sculpture of a hare with gems embedded in it. I was immediately captivated by this story - it was the first time I had ever heard about this children's book As a kid who loved mysteries and games like Clue and an adult who loves puzzles and Escape Rooms, this story spoke to me.

When I read the premise of The Skeleton Key I was immediately hooked. The story brought to life how a treasure hunt can get out of control so quickly. While the first half of the book is fairly slow, the second half really kicks up the drama and hooks you in. I found myself picking my jaw up off the floor a few times with the plot twists and turns. Just when you think certain characters can't get any worse - they do.

For the last 100 or so pages had so many emotions. The need for justice to be carried out..... but for who? The level of frustration I had with Frank and Cora Churcher is up there with some of my most hated book characters. These two parents putting the weight of the world on their daughter's shoulders and simultaneously making their son feel inadequate makes the reader dislike them from the beginning of the story. I found myself rooting for the kids to band together and end the hunt for the golden bones!

Overall, I enjoyed the Skeleton Key and found it evoked a lot of emotion which, to me, is the hallmark of a great book! 4/5 stars.