Tell Tale by Claire Parkin

 

Eleven-year-old Debbie-Marie Tunstall has a vivid imagination, one that regularly gets her into trouble. Deciding to run away from home, she stumbles across a dead body. Who can she persuade to believe that she's telling the truth this time around?

I adored author Claire Parkin's debut novel, The Final Hours Of Murial Hinchcliffe MBE, so I was delighted when I received a copy of Tell Tale. From the synopsis, this sounded like an intriguing and fun read.

The main character, Debbie, is one you can't help but fall in love with. She's highly intelligent and has an overactive imagination. At eleven-years-old she still has that mixture of irrational childhood fear and worldliness. There are some laugh-out-loud moments. I loved the way Debbie thought about God, with the local vicar being "God's best mate" and the fact she felt she should avoid church to give God "a chance to calm down a bit". Unfortunately, her snooping and tall tales have made her unpopular in the small community she lives in. This is hardly surprising when we learn of some of her antics. 

Alongside Debbie, there are a host of eccentric characters who live in the village of Llanfair, Wales. The storyline flits between three other characters, but through these, we learn of many more of the inhabitants of the village and the secrets they are hiding. Being set in 1984, the author evokes many memories through her descriptions, particularly those of the fashion of the day.

I did feel that the pace in the first half of the book was slow, with the story really only picking up when Debbie ran away from home. There is lots of mystery contained within the plot, but some of it, such as the thread involving Vanessa, the child psychologist, seemed superfluous. The villain of the piece became fairly obvious towards the end of the story, but the unveiling was cleverly done and held a tinge of sadness.

Tell Tale by Claire Parkin will be published on 23rd July 2026 in hardback, ebook, and audio format. My thanks to Pan Macmillan for a review copy.

Author Details

Claire was born and brought up in a village just outside Cardiff, and graduated from King’s College London with an MA in 19th Century English and American Literature. She worked as a journalist on women’s general-interest magazines for many years, writing for Essentials, Woman & Home and Candis, where she was known for being able to turn her hand to pretty much anything – from interviewing boxing champs and war correspondents, to learning how to pole dance and the correct way to iron a shirt. Other career highlights include taste-testing eight varieties of mince pie during an August heatwave, begging Victoria Beckham to donate a dress to a charity raffle, and visiting six second-hand car dealerships in one afternoon, in a bid to expose sexism in the motoring industry.

She turned to fiction after the birth of her twin son and daughter. Three of her short stories have been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and one was runner-up in the Fiction Desk Newcomer of the Year Award (2016). She is currently working on her second novel, Tell Tale, about a troubled ten-year-old girl who manipulates rising community tensions for her own amusement.

Claire lives in London with her husband and children. When she’s not writing, she’s a passionate Parkrunner, container-gardener and baker of calorific goods. After a break of several years, she’s finally enjoying mince pies again.