Striking up a friendship with her landlord, Grant, and his younger sister, Cass, she begins to suspect that all might not be quite as it seems at Hare House. And as autumn turns to winter, and a heavy snowfall traps the inhabitants of the estate within its walls, tensions rise to fever pitch. Sally was born in London in 1969 but says she “grew up all over the world” as her father served the Foreign Office in New York, Kuwait, Tanzania, Dubai, Zambia and Jordan.

I didn’t sympathize with any of the main characters and the side characters were hard to tell apart. Too many plot points were never explained, and the book seemed to feed into stereotypes without challenging them in any way. I don’t need my books to promote good morals and I usually enjoy an unreliable narrator, but I at least was hoping she would be challenged on her extremely problematic views in some way by anyone at all in the text and she really wasn’t. This is one of those books I find difficult to rate, I raced through it but at the same time I don’t think I really enjoyed it. The experience reminded me a little of reading things like Gone Girl I just got caught up in wanting to know what was going on, even though I wasn’t expecting a satisfying denouement. Although it’s well-crafted in terms of prose style, atmospheric, and Sally Hinchcliffe’s highly effective at establishing a sense of place, the issues I had were with the story/plot and the portrayal of certain characters. The novel’s set in a remote area of rural Scotland where a rather enigmatic woman has retreated, after an unspecified incident ended her teaching career. She relates her experiences solely from her own perspective and gives every appearance of being an unreliable narrator. It’s difficult to go into too many details without spoilers but this falls somewhere between psychological and supernatural mystery – with a nod towards folk horror. The narrator becomes embroiled in a series of unsettling events related to the local community: hints of witchcraft, mysterious animal deaths, and disturbing effigies abound. However, it’s unclear what’s real and what’s imagined.That’s without even getting to the delicious intrigue Hinchcliffe cooks up around the tragic Hendersons, or how the book uses landscape. There are particular scenes and descriptions I can’t stop thinking about: the countryside surrounding the house, particularly when snow falls and an eerie quiet is tangible; the narrator’s feelings of freedom and release as she learns to cycle; the bare, shadowy gloom of Hare House, too big and too old for its inhabitants. I kept waiting for the narrative to falter, kept wondering if there’d be some development that would change the way I felt about it – but it is note-perfect all the way to the bravura ending, which made me almost squeal with glee. And the language! The writing! Crisp as fresh snow, sharp as broken glass, not a sentence wasted, not a word out of place.

When a young woman arrives in a remote and far removed part of Scotland, looking to escape her troubled and shadowed past she may find that this place of peace and nature may not be as tranquil as she had hoped. Either way, it becomes clear that the dying hare on the road is a metaphor both for what is to come and what has been. Did our narrator control its fate, or was it controlling hers? This question of who’s the victim and who’s the perpetrator pertains to the two intertwined mysteries – one in the past and one in the present – that lie at heart of Hinchcliffe’s dark and absorbing second novel. We have an unnamed narrator; a woman whose teaching career came to an end after a seemingly innocuous incident involving her A-Level students. To retreat/escape/start again, she decides to take refuge within a remote Scottish town. She rents a cottage from Grant, but also manages to ingratiate herself into the family's inner circle, becoming something akin to a friend or confidante to both Grant and his much younger, teenage sister, Cass. The family have suffered tragedies, but as our narrator spends more time there, she discovers that there are rumours and whisperings between the locals, suggestions of witches. God, I just loved this book. I know it’s impossible, but I wish everything I read could make me feel like this: alive with excitement about what fiction can do, half-certain it was written specifically for me, and immediately desperate to read it all over again.The story is good. It's well paced and just spooky enough. I would have liked to gather more of a connection to our narrator, who we never learned the name of. There is also an unreliable narrator, a single woman, approaching middle age, who has left teaching following an “incident”, some “mass hysteria” in the classroom. The reader learns more about this as the novel develops. She now does online work, writing essays and papers for people. I’m thrilled to see Hare House chosen as Scottish Book of the Month and I hope it encourages more people to come and see the region for themselves. Moving into a cottage on the remote estate of Hare House, she begins to explore her new home - a patchwork of hills, moorland and forest. Sally, who moved to Dumfriesshire from London in 2008, works full-time as a freelance writer and editor and is also known in the region for her cycle campaigning locally and nationally through Cycling Dumfries, Pedal on Parliament, and the Women’s Cycle Forum Scotland.