"Immersive, gripping and meticulously researched, this true crime thriller explores motive, culpability and a family’s fight to clear a loved one’s name through the unique lens of a reporter."
Written by one of the first journalists on the case, Jeremy Craddock’s true crime tome, The Lady in the Lake, reads like a gripping murder-mystery thriller.
As for the case, in summer 1991, divers discovered a suspicious package in Coniston Water in the Lake District. When it emerges that the package contains the body of Carol Park, a young wife and mother who’d been missing since 1976, suspicion falls firmly on Carol’s husband Gordon, who returns from a holiday with his third wife to face detectives, and packs of journalists.
Among the press is the author of this book, who was at the time a young Lake District newspaper reporter, and ideally placed to closely follow a case that’s stayed with him for decades. Indeed, from the immersive accounts of the unfolding trial that cites evidence of couple’s open marriage, affairs, and Graham Park’s controlling behaviour, readers are given a ringside seat, with pacey, atmospheric writing conjuring a sense that you’re there in court, hearing the evidence, and witnessing Park’s conviction for murder.
But the story doesn’t end there — Park always stated his innocence, and the appeal is every bit as grippingly presented as the original trial, with new interviews with the police, witnesses and family members also giving this book chilling edge.
Spanning decades, from the 1970s to the present day, it’s an edge-of-your-seat, true crime feat that delivers exactly what’s promised in its Prologue — “a narrative woven with lies and heartbreak for a divided family, a story of dogged detective work, of reporters feeding a terrible tale to an electrified public” — from the murky shores of Coniston Water, to the intensity of the courthouse.
| Primary Genre | Biographies & Autobiographies |
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