Leaving him in the care of the stern housekeeper, Ruth, without even saying goodbye, nine-year-old Samuel’s beloved mother has gone for six weeks to America, where she is ostensibly searching for loans to shore up the family business. But is she really? Oh, sure, she has sent the boy a paltry seven postcards, but otherwise there has been nothing but silence. So when a school friend tells him a probably apocryphal story about a German housekeeper who murdered her employers, Samuel becomes certain that Ruth has murdered his mother ... In his first novel for adults...Australian author Giles offers a neat little thriller with enough red herrings and clever ambiguities to keep the pages turning on the way to a disturbing, surprise ending. And, oh, about that rabbit . . .
Nine-year-old boys can have active imaginations. Left alone, without a mother or father and in the care of a doting but well-meaning housekeeper, that imagination can easily reach extremes, from incredible fantasy to irrational terror. Such is the case for the impressionable Samuel Clay, who yearns for his mother constantly and can recite the exact number of days she has been gone to the United States, in Stephen Giles’ intensely gripping thriller, The Boy at the Keyhole.
...chilling and totally unforgettable ... The brilliance and fun of Stephen Giles' debut work of adult fiction is the ambiguity and shades of gray ... This psychological thriller keeps readers guessing from the soft start, through the creepy build, until the end, and then surprises with some hard punches. The writing style is brisk and stark ... Giles deftly handles his claustrophobic story, allowing readers just enough of the two possibly disturbed pole-star characters to draw them in close and still hold them at bay ... a captivating examination of love, loyalty, loss and imagination.
In Giles’ debut novel for adults, he poses a psychological puzzle with its roots in Du Maurier and other gothic fiction. Samuel Clay runs home from school every day, excited to see whether he’s received a new postcard from his mother. She has traveled from Cornwall to America, where she was born, to try to raise money—as he’s only 9, Samuel is hazy on the details—after the death of Samuel’s father left them struggling. So Samuel is staying with Ruth, the faithful housekeeper ... When his best friend tells him a story about a housekeeper who murdered an entire family and stashed their bodies in the cellar, something clicks, and Samuel becomes certain that Ruth murdered his mother ... In the end, the mystery is not as layered or complex as it could have been, because of this same perspective, but Giles succeeds in crafting a surprising climax.
In Giles’s nightmarish first novel for adults...nine-year-old Samuel Clay lives on an estate in Cornwall, England, with only the tyrannical housekeeper, Ruth Tupper, for company. Samuel’s mother, a widow, has gone to America to take care of her late husband’s business ... But after four months, Samuel, who misses his mother, has begun to get ideas in his head (thanks to his hyper-imaginative schoolmate, Joseph): maybe his mother’s been murdered by Ruth, who buried her body in the basement. The more closely he observes Ruth, who perhaps has secrets to hide, the more firmly he comes to believe that his suspicions are true ... Told entirely from Samuel’s point of view, the novel is so adeptly constructed and controlled that Ruth becomes a chilling study in ambiguity.
A lonely 9-year-old boy. A stern housekeeper. A missing mother. An almost-empty English mansion. These are the underpinnings that gently crescendo to a stunning climax in this tale of a mind’s imbalance. But whose? ... This clever psychological thriller reads like a quiet introspection into the vivid imagination of a young boy. Is he going mad? Or does Ruth expertly skew the facts to make it seem that way? Tension builds as small details are revealed one by one, the story slowly building to a surprise ending that will leave readers saying, 'Wow, I didn’t see that coming!'
