Verwandte Artikel zu One of the Family

One of the Family - Hardcover

Edwards, Mark

 
9781668204801: One of the Family
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1668204800 ISBN 13: 9781668204801
Verlag: Atria Books, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

The “so clever and fresh” (Lisa Jewell, #1 New York Times bestselling author) author of The Wasp Trap returns with a novel best described as Succession set in the Scottish Highlands where a plot to murder the patriarch’s younger fiancée entangles an innocent outsider in a nest of deadly secrets.

A week in paradise—with the family from hell.

When Patrick is invited by his girlfriend to join her and her family on a luxury holiday in a remote and beautiful part of Scotland, he has no idea that he is about to be plunged into a nightmare of a family, sinister behavior…and a plot to murder the patriarch’s younger fiancée.

Arriving at the house, Patrick meets Holly’s dad, self-made-millionaire Charles, along with her brother Lewis and older sister Miranda. Also on the trip is the widowed Charles’ bride-to-be, Jasmine, who—in her thirties—is around the same age as the three siblings. Lewis and Miranda are horrified by their dad’s impending marriage to this younger woman. Surely, she is just after his money—and is going to steal their inheritance from them. To make things worse, Jasmine is an almost exact doppelganger of their mother before she got sick and died.

Patrick finds himself in the middle of this viper’s nest, trying to keep out of the family crosshairs. He starts to suspect that Lewis has dark plans for Jasmine—putting himself in peril as a potential witness who could mess up his scheme. Perhaps more than one person won’t escape this family of snakes…

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Edwards is the bestselling author and coauthor of over twenty books, including those he has written with Louise Voss. His latest thriller is The Wasp Trap. Originally from Hastings in East Sussex, Mark now lives in Wolverhampton, UK, with his wife, their children, three cats, and a golden retriever. Find out more at MarkEdwardsAuthor.com. 

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Chapter One CHAPTER ONE
DECEMBER 2025

Are you scared?”

We had been driving west for three hours, farther and farther from any populated area with every passing mile. Inverness Airport, where we had picked up our rental, seemed a long way behind us. The last car we’d seen had gone by twenty minutes ago, just after we’d driven past the sign telling us the main road across the peninsula was closed because of snow and that we’d have to take the much longer coastal route. I was a city dweller, used to traffic jams and red lights, to noise and people, not silence and sheep. I wasn’t accustomed to driving on single-track roads along clifftops that dropped to deserted rocky beaches. I wasn’t used to it at all.

But that wasn’t why Holly had asked me if I was scared.

It was because I was going to meet her family. Her brother and her sister and her sister’s husband.

And her dad. Charles Grant.

The way he loomed in my imagination, she might have been taking me to meet Charles Manson.

“Scared?” I asked. “Not at all.”

“Nervous, then?”

“No. I’m excited.”

She knew I was lying, but she reached across from the passenger seat and lay her hand on my thigh, just above my knee. “That’s the spirit. They’re going to love you.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Hmm. Well, if my dad suggests a trip out to sea in a small boat, that’s when you should start worrying. Apparently, the water here is deeper than at any other point around the British Isles.”

“Noted. Avoid trips in small boats.”

She laughed. “Don’t worry, Patrick. I’m not going to let that happen. I’m sure you and Dad will get on brilliantly.”

I glanced over at her. Nine months into our relationship, she could still take my breath away, even in the long, quilted coat that could easily have been mistaken for a sleeping bag. When I’d first shown her picture to my friends the general reaction was that I was punching above my weight, which I pretended to find offensive. But the truth was, with her natural red hair, feline green eyes, and the way she always looked like she was thinking of something wicked-but-funny, I was still not quite able to believe my luck.

She was gorgeous. And her family was rich. Not just well-off. Seriously, famously, loaded. It had made me uncomfortable at first, and a little worried. I had never been skiing, or stayed in a five-star hotel. I knew nothing about wine or stocks and shares, and to me “the season” was the period when football was played, not the time of year when the other half enjoyed Glyndebourne and the Proms and Ascot. What would Holly, and her family, think of someone from a modest background like me? But when I’d raised this with Holly very early in our relationship, she had been taken aback.

“Do I really seem like the kind of girl who goes to the Proms? I’m just like you, Patrick. Completely ordinary.”

“Thanks.”

She had laughed. “I didn’t mean it like that. I think we see the world in the same way, don’t you? And just so you know, my dad grew up with no money. He’s a working-class lad. He’d much rather go to a Villa match than bloody Glyndebourne.”

I didn’t point out that he’d be sitting in the most expensive seat in the stadium. I liked hearing her say we were the same, because I believed it, too. Halfway through our first date, when she had told me, while attempting a really bad Arnie impression, that Terminator 2 was her favorite movie, I had begun to experience something that had only happened once or twice before. The sensation of meeting a kindred spirit. We liked the same music and books and food. Hated the same things, too—from virtue-signaling to the word nom—and agreed about politics. That first evening, in a vegetarian restaurant in Brighton, there hadn’t been a single moment of awkwardness or silence. After kissing her good night I hadn’t been able to stop grinning all the way home.

“How about you?” I asked now. “Are you nervous?”

“Oh, I’ve met my family lots of times.”

It was my turn to laugh. “I meant about meeting Jasmine.”

Instead of answering, Holly exhaled and turned her face to the window. Beneath us, the gray sea beat against the shore, foaming and clawing at the dark pebbles.

“I’m excited,” she said. “In exactly the same way you are.”

“It’s going to be much harder for her, though.”

Holly didn’t reply. We had first heard Jasmine’s name a month ago, when a flurry of texts had landed on Holly’s phone, followed by hours of WhatsApp chat with her siblings, and days of speculation that had ended with a FaceTime call with Charles, who had confirmed that yes, he had met someone. He’d been keeping it quiet because he wanted to be sure before he shared the news with the rest of the family. And then the bombshell:

They were engaged. Planning to marry in the next few months.

Since then, I’d heard Holly on the phone to her siblings, Lewis and Miranda, on numerous occasions, murmuring in other rooms, but whenever I broached the subject, she said there was nothing to talk about. “Not until I actually meet her,” she had said, the last time I had brought Jasmine up, a few days before we’d departed for this trip. “Then I’m sure I’ll have lots to say.”

“Good stuff, hopefully.”

“Actually, I’ve decided to be optimistic. Dad’s been on his own for a long time, so this Jasmine must have something special about her. He’s very choosy.” She had put her arms around my neck. “Like me.”

We drove on. The landscape was all greens and grays, the craggy hills ascending to our left, the cold sea below to our right. In the distance, beyond that forbidding, churning water, the dark mountains of Skye: the Cuillins, the Red and the Black. As soon as Holly asked me if I would like to join her and the other Grants on their annual trip to Applecross, I had looked it up on Google Maps. This was my first ever trip to the Scottish Highlands and I didn’t want to appear completely ignorant about the local geography in front of her family.

“We always spend Hogmanay there,” she had told me. “New Year’s Eve, to you and me.”

“I do know what Hogmanay is.”

“Oh, I know. But my parents always insisted we say Hogmanay while in Scotland. They bought a holiday home there thirty years ago.”

“When you were, what? Six?”

“Yep. We’ve been every year since. A couple of weeks every summer, and the week between Christmas and New Year—apart from, well, you know.”

She meant her lost years. The decade she’d spent in Asia and Australia.

“We hardly ever went on foreign holidays,” she went on. “Dad never took us to Disneyland or the Maldives. It was always Scotland.”

“Deprived of visiting the Maldives. You poor thing.” My family’s idea of an extravagant holiday had been a week camping in Camber Sands.

“I know, I know.” To her credit, she had cringed. “I was a totally spoiled, privileged brat. Please, whenever I say something like that, you have my permission to tell me to shut the fuck up.”

We rounded a bend, and Holly said, “You’ll need to take a left turn in a...

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Verlag
Atria Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668204800
ISBN 13 
9781668204801
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
336
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Verantwortliche Person
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