The Estate by Liza Costello

Today is my stop on the Blog Tour for The Estate by Liza Costello! Don’t forget to check out the rest of the stops!

The Synopsis

There's no place like home...and Beth hopes there never will be again.

Beth never had a settled home as a child, but that's all behind her now. She's fine. Great. Settled in her single life. Until friends start peeling away, moving on to careers and family, leaving her feeling impatient and angry. When she bumps into Jason at a party, she spots the opportunity for her own fresh start - to turn her back on a reckless life of drinking and missed deadlines. She can build a new life, too...can't she? When she discovers that Jason has the opportunity to house-sit a new build out of town, she glimpses her chance. There's only one catch - Jason needs to stay in town for the sake of his new job. But Beth can keep their dreams alive on her own, can't she?

As her drinking worsens, and new friends turn out to be prospective enemies, her sense of reality begins to unravel. As Beth comes to confront the mysteries of her own past, she moves closer to understanding the desperate crime at the heart of the estate. But first she must learn who is behind the strange attacks on her new home. And is Jason who she thought he was? Can she even trust him?

My Review

Due to earlier starts, I’ve recently been driving a lot more on my commute rather than taking the train, and The Estate came along at the perfect time, receiving the ‘honour’ of being the first audiobook that I listened to during my commute!! This improved my drives to say the least! The only downside was that it had me so gripped, I often struggled to get out of the car upon reaching my destination!
I found Beth to be an extremely interesting central character and enjoyed the way that the narrative switched between the past and the present to reveal what had gone on at The Estate and to subtly create a sense of foreboding regarding the state that Beth was currently in.
I really didn’t know which, if any, of the characters that I could trust and found myself constantly questioning everything that I read. While I guessed a small part of the plot in terms of the cause of Beth’s troubles, the dark and twisty atmosphere kept me hooked and dying to find out the full story. Which in the end turned out to be satisfyingly explained and still had a few surprises in store.
Additionally, I thought that the narrator did a fantastic job. Not only could I always tell who was speaking, sometimes due to the most subtle differences in her voice, but also the way she read really added to the atmosphere.
Overall, I’m giving The Estate 4 out of 5. It’s gripping, eerie and super intense. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Click to buy from Amazon UK

This audiobook was provided free in exchange for an honest review

About the Author

Liza Costello was born in County Westmeath, where she lives with her husband and two children. A copy editor and poet, her writing has been broadcast on RTE Radio 1 and published in outlets including The Stinging Fly, The Saturday Independent (Ireland), The Manchester Review and Mslexia. Costello won the Dromineer Literary Festival Poetry Award (2011), came joint second for the Patrick Kavanagh Award for an unpublished collection of poetry (2015), and has been shortlisted for the Sean O’Faolain International Short Story Competition and the Francis McManus Short Story Competition. She is currently completing a PhD on the work of the Irish writer Dermot Healy.