Published By: Penguin
Pages: 400
Released On: 14/03/2024
You’ve known her all your life…
Or have you?
Tasha and her husband Aaron are having a much-needed week away in Venice. With their two young children being cared for back home by Tasha’s older sister Alice, it’s the perfect opportunity for them to reconnect as a couple.
Until they start to feel they’re being followed.
Then Tasha receives a phonecall to say Alice and her husband Kyle have been attacked. Alice is in intensive care, and Kyle has died.
The twins are, miraculously, safe.
They rush home to be with their daughters, to support Alice, and to help with the police investigation.
But in the middle of it all a note arrives, addressed to Tasha: It was supposed to be you.
What soon emerges are secrets buried far deeper than any of this family realise. Everyone has a history. But how far would you go to protect those you love?
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
*Contains Potential Minor Spoilers*
A new Claire Douglas book? Don’t mind if I do. I can always rely on her for a thrilling read.
The synopsis explains what will happen: that Alice and Kyle will be attacked and that Kyle will die. And yet it is still shocking to read. That’s what I love about Claire’s books, they’re familiar and provide everything you want frrom a thriller, and yet they never feel stale or samey or predictable, which is impressive in itself.
We have four points-of-view. We mainly have Tasha, who is the woman with the twins, and Jeanette, Tasha and Alice’s Mum. But we also have the POV of two mysterious people that crop up now and again, adding a bit of intrigue.
There are a lot of characters in this book, as you would expect from a close-knit community, but I’ll focus on a few.
We have Tasha and Aaron, married, with twin daughters. They’re always busy and they feel their romance has been lacking recently so take up the offer to spend a few days in romantic Venice. There is clearly something going on with Tasha, something from her past, but I think she’s a really interesting main character. She’s strong and powerful, loving and caring, but somewhat guarded. Aaron was okay. I didn’t like or dislike him particularly, I had no strong feelings about him either way, but I liked him and Tasha together. Then we have their daughters Elsie and Flossie. I don’t need to say much about them because they’re just two little girls, but they kept a sense of normality through the story.
Then we have Tasha’s sister Alice and her husband Kyle. They’re rich and successful and the complete opposite to Tasha, and yet Alice also has this secrecy about her, this feeling that she’s protecting something or someone. We don’t get to know Kyle that much before he dies; he’s relatively new to the family but seemed to fit in straight away.
We then have Viv who is Aaron’s Mum, and Jeanette who is Tasha and Alice’s Mum. They clearly have some history, but as separate characters I think they’re really interesting. Jeanette is grieving – but for whom or for what I won’t go into – and I really felt for her. She had separated herself from her family, and I just wanted to keep her close. Viv was a bit more of an enigmatic character. She’s caring and thoughtful and will clearly do anything for her family, but there was a chill to her that I didn’t get from Jeanette.
All of the characters are fabulous though. They’re not all trustworthy and they’re not always nice, and some I liked more than others, but they’re all very well written and all work well off of the main storyline, and off of Tasha and Alice.
What I love about Claire’s books is – and stay with me on this – they’re so familiar. I don’t mean that we’re all used to murder, but they’re generally set at home, with families, in communities where this kind of stuff doesn’t happen. It’s not over-the-top, it’s freighteningly recognisable and plausible. We see ourselves in the characters and that is where the books’ strength lies; they’re very real and that’s thrilling.
Like any good thriller, there is clearly more going on than meets the eye, lots of hidden clues and red herrings, but they’re not overwhelming or unbelievable.
There were a couple of…not negatives as such, because they weren’t…I can’t explain them fully without spoilers, but there were a couple of sub plotlines dropped in that I would have liked to read more about. Things like…trying to be as vague as possible…Kyle’s business, the threatening note, the mysterious colleague. They weren’t bad in any way – I’m not sure Claire Douglas knows how to write a bad book – but I wanted just a little bit more of them.
Obviously I’m not about to spoil the ending, but it’s satisfying enough for this to be a closed case, but it also teases the possibility of more and I wonder if this is a story that Claire might revisit at some point. I for one would definitely be reading it.
I read it in less than a day. It is so addictive, as I expected, and once you start, there’s no stopping until you reach the conclusion. She’s definitely got another winner on her hands.
Books By Your Bedside 