I am very excited to be welcoming Gina Cheyne to Novel Kicks and the blog tour for her book, Twenty-Six Years Living a Lie.

Twenty-Six Years Living a Lie

In 1997, high in the alpine resort of Tignes, Cecily celebrates her third wedding anniversary with a night of passion. But in the morning her  happiness turns to misery and shock when she find her husband Nick dead in the bed beside her, the victim of a sudden heart attack.

Six weeks later, Cecily learns she is pregnant.

Twenty-six years later, her son Charlie takes a DNA test alongside his uncle Adam, Nick’s identical twin. The results shatter everything he thought he knew: Charlie is not related to Adam. If Nick wasn’t his father, then who was?

Cecily insists she was faithful, and the timing points only to that single night in Tignes. Desperate for answers, she turns to the SeeMs Detective Agency. Could someone have entered her room that night without her knowing? And if so—who? And why?

As the detectives dig deeper, they uncover a web of conflicting memories, buried secrets, and dangerous lies. Slowly they discover other people are in danger and if they don’t find out very soon what really happened in that wonderful night in Tignes two, or maybe more, lives will be lost.

To talk about the themes of Twenty-Six Years Living a Lie, it’s over to you, Gina. 

This book is first of all a whodunnit, although it is who fathered Charlie, rather than who killed his father, (father died of a heart attack) but it has other themes in its writing.

Sometimes when you are writing a novel these themes jump out at you when you aren’t expecting them. I was planning to write a straight whodunnit inspired by a dark night in the ski resort of Tignes in the French Alps. So dark was the night that I thought someone could climb over the balcony, and enter my bed. We could share a night of passion, and I would never know it was not my husband! However, other things wanted to be heard in the story.

Firstly, the theme of knowing yourself. We think we know other people and ourselves very well, but do we? Cecily has idolised her dead first husband and thinks of her second husband as merely security and the father of her other children. But, as the story progresses it is obvious that he is much more than that. He has a depth of kindness and insight she did not understand until everything goes wrong.

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