Twenty-one years ago, Dr Richard Carter and his wife Pamela were murdered in what has become the most infamous double murder of the modern age.
Ten-year-old Sara Carter – nicknamed the Angel of Death – spent eight years in a children’s secure unit and is living quietly under an assumed name with a family of her own.
This knowledge stains every breath, every pump and beat of my heart, every sunrise and sunset, every human touch. It pollutes my dreams, smears itself across my future, and the weight of my sorrow drives me into the dirt. There are no winners here.
Now, on the anniversary of the trial, a documentary team has tracked down her older sister Shannon Carter, compelling her to break two decades of silence.
Her explosive interview sparks national headlines and journalist Brinley Booth, a childhood friend of the Carter sisters, is tasked with covering the news story.
For the first time, the three women are forced to confront what really happened on that blood-soaked night – with devastating consequences for them all.
Fiona Cummins is an award-winning former Daily Mirror showbusiness journalist and a graduate of the Faber Academy Writing A Novel course. Rattle, her debut novel, has been translated into several languages and received widespread critical acclaim from authors including Val McDermid, Lee Child and Martina Cole. Marcel Berlins wrote in The Times: ‘Amid the outpouring of crime novels, Rattle is up there with the best of them.’
Fiona was selected for McDermid’s prestigious New Blood panel at the 2017 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, where her novel was nominated for a Dead Good Reader Award for Most Exceptional Debut. A sequel, The Collector, was published in February 2018 and David Baldacci described it as ‘A crime novel of the very first order’. Rattle and The Collector are now being adapted into a TV series by the Tiger Aspect, the producers of Peaky Blinders.
Her third novel – standalone thriller The Neighbour – was published in April 2019. Ian Rankin described it as ‘creepy as hell’. Her fourth novel When I Was Ten will be published in August 2020.
When Fiona is not writing, she can be found on Twitter, eating biscuits or walking her dogs. She lives in Essex with her family.
This was superb! Told from two points of view, the sister and the journalist, When I Was Ten is a really well-written book that cleverly entwines the two stories and holds your interest well through the whole book.
Growing up in a beautiful house in a beautiful village with your parents being proper upstanding pillars of the community hides a whole load of secrets behind the scenes. There are unexpected plot twists and turns throughout which helps to hold your interest. The story shows that behind a perfect pretence all is not what it seems and even when you think you know, and you feel like you have it all worked out there is another twist and you have no idea where it came from.
A great read, the sinister side of the middle class, even more so because you don’t know if it might be true of others around you, of what’s real and what’s not and even at the very end I’m still not quite sure I know, very cleverly written!
Thank you to Net Galley, the Publisher and the Author for a free advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Title | When I Was Ten |
Author | Fiona Cummins |
Series | N/A |
Format | eARC |
Page Count | 384 Pages |
Genre | Psychological Thriller |
Publisher | Pan |
Release Date | 6th August 2020 |
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