The doomy mood of this rural chiller is established in the opening sentence: "The clothes of the dead won't wear long." Like a great many of the doomier pronouncements in the book, it turn out to be a piece of rural superstition, but after a couple of chapters it's hard to tell the old wives tales which play such an important part in the narrative from the real tale, a piecing together of a long ago love affair. An old folks home is an unlikely setting for a thriller at the best of times, and here it work well, largely thanks to the two strong women at its core - Stella, elderly but still small and in control, and Jenny, her young carer - and the stop unravels in suitably claustrophobic flashbacks, but on the whole this is a soft centred Vine which may not wrap itself around every reader with the usual relentlessness.
