Eleanor Churcher has spent her whole life trying to outrun the bone hunt that her parents had written into a book "The Golden Bones" which features a woman named Elinore whose bones were scattered and must be put back together again in order to return to her true love. Gold bones were indeed scattered around by her parents with clues hidden in the book. However, the Bonehunter community eventually turned to the real Eleanor and believed the last bone was the one in her body. Now, on the fiftieth anniversary of "The Golden Bones" Nell has returned home with her family for an anniversary celebration where her father is going to reveal the final missing golden bone to put together the fictional Elinore. However, when it's time for the reveal, a very real human bone appears instead of the golden bone. The Churcher family is sent into a frenzy with a real skeleton in the closet, a missing gold bone and decades of family secrets revealed.

The Skeleton Key is a complex mystery with interesting characters and a plot that keeps building. With a storyline that moves back and forth through time and from the points of view of many different characters, I was kept on my toes with the mystery of the missing golden bone, the Churcher's history and the potential suspects. I was entranced by the entire Churcher family and how their life seemed like a fairy tale from the outside, but was cracked and tearing the family apart from the inside. It was interesting to see how the different family members dealt with living in such a prominent and sought after family, as well as how they dealt with the renewed interest and investigation surrounding the real skeleton. With an interesting twist and unexpected ending, The Skeleton Key offers a mystery wrapped in a mystery with a cast of amazing characters.

This book was received for free in return for an honest review. ( )

I loved this book, which I initially picked up more or less by chance in Waterstone’s, looking for another book to complete my selection to take advantage of one of their multi-buy offers. Not only was it a compelling and gripping story in its own right, but it brought back memories of various ‘treasure-hunt’ books from the past which I remember being hugely popular throughout the late 1970s and 1980s.

The story is mainly narrated by Nell, whose father had written one such treasure hunt book back in the 1970s. This had proved immensely popular, as it encouraged readers to search for components in a bejewelled skeleton. Over the years, all the section but one had been discovered. However, in addition to its considerable commercial success, the book had also spawned a sort of cult following, many of whose members became dangerously obsessed with the writer’s daughter, convinced that she herself represented the missing piece.

Reading what I have just written above, I realise it seems rather ridiculous. Fortunately, Erin Kelly writes far better than I do, and her story is completely compelling and I had no difficulty suspending my disbelief. She manages the narrative effectively, moving back and forth in time, and also adopting different narrative perspectives. There are also several finely balanced subplots unfurling throughout the book, all of which serve to deepen the patina of plausibility.

Nell is an especially well drawn character, and I found her fragile and antagonistic relationship with her family very easy to believe. ( )

Two families intertwined in a complex relationship are faced with the potential fallout from a dark event twenty years in the past. The families are connected by intermarriage, live together in one large (but separated) house and everyone seems to have had an affair with everyone else. Between them they have produced a treasure hunt book with the parts of a golden skeleton as the prizes that has blighted their lives through obsessive fans as well as making them rich. Everyone has something to hide.

The narrative basis of the book is highly contrived. Essentially, a group of friends loosely structure themselves into two families and proceed to live in each others’ pockets for forty years. Further, one of them - Frank, the patriarch - supported by the others produces an art book retelling a folk tale including clues to a treasure he has hidden across the country. This has so grabbed the imagination that thousands of people remain obsessed over four decades later; enough to follow family members around and threaten their lives.

The thriller story is quite a good one and well told. Almost all the characters, major and incidental, are horrible and unlikeable. Everyone seems to act without the slightest concern for any consequences. Towards the end I was struggling to see how anyone could come out of this with any integrity or satisfaction.

For me, the contrivances that bring all the characters together and define how they relate overshadowed any pleasure in the working out of the thriller plot. ( )

Quitting at 17%. I'm finding this extremely dull, and the idea of the treasure hunt based on a book appeals to me less than I had anticipated. ( )

What drew me in to The Skeleton Key were a) the cover of the book, which seemed to promise both magic and ordinary life and b) the fact that it was built around a book. In this case, a treasure hunt book that's now 50 years old, involves a quest to re-assemble a skeleton, has a world-wide, obsessive fan base, and has shaped the lives of two close families—one the author/illustrator's, the other his best friend's.

Erin Kelly has structured this novel brilliantly, switching back and forth in time, doling out crucial pieces of information at regular intervals, but never revealing the full story until the novel's conclusion. Normally, this might have been a DNF title for me because it's much more about family dynamics than about a book and the magic it creates, but Kelly kept me hooked.

The narrative voice alternates between omniscient and first-person, and in the first-person sections the voice we hear is that of Nell, short for Eleanor, the daughter of the author/illustrator. The book's skeletal heroine is Elinore, so not surprisingly Nell has been hounded her entire life by "boneheads," individuals attempting to solve the book's puzzles and locate the jeweled bones associated with them. Early on readers learn that, as a child, Nell was attacked by a bonehead who was convinced the removing a bone from the body of the living Nell/Eleanor would somehow complete the quest set up in the book.

The Skeleton Key spins out in multiple directions and readers come to see deep, often disturbing, links among the two central families and immense character flaws in each of these individuals. If you enjoy books drenched in suspense with characters you can never quite be certain of, you're going to love reading The Skeleton Key. I found that to be true—even though the novel wasn't as bookish as I'd hoped when I began reading.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own. ( )