Published By: Raven Books
Pages: 400
Released On: 19/06/2025
They’re not looking for what you think they are…
The play date started well. The children happy in one room while their mothers relaxed and drank wine in another.
But then the stranger appeared at the window. And then he was inside the house. And then he grabbed the knife…
Alice only means to stop him. She didn’t mean to kill him.
The police conclude that she acted in self-defence, but wracked with guilt, Alice sets out to apologise to Linda, the mother of the young man she killed – only to find she is unable to come clean about who she really is. But as Alice learns more about Ezra and why he was at her house, she starts to wonder whether she really has the full picture about what happened that day…
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Raven Books for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
This is my first of Katherine’s books but it sure won’t be my last.
Where I think this excels is in its normality. I love thrillers, in fact they’re probably my most read genre, but they can be a bit fanciful, because they’re fiction, they’re entertainment, they don’t need to be real. Whereas a break-in is very possible. Ignoring the twists and turns in the book, the simple fact is a break-in can happen to anyone and does happen often, and so it’s easy to put yourself in that position and that’s what ramps up the thrill factor.
I loved how much Katherine focussed on the mental side of a situation like this. I can’t imagine it’s very easy to get over a break-in anyway, let alone a death. But I find a lot of books, TV shows, an films sort of gloss over tat, but Katherine really shows how it lingers.
Yes it is about a break-in but there’s so much more going on. There’s so many layers, and it’s dripping in twists and turs, and yet it manages to stay on the right side of too much.
I wasn’t a huge fan of any of the characters – not in the sense that they’re badly written, but because they’re immensely unlikeable. Alice was probably the only one that I did have some compassion for because of what she was put through, and kept being put through, with no-one believing her. She was just protecting her daughter, but it became a lot bigger than just that and she is having to wade through everything that was being thrown at her. The secondary characters are all written well and work well off of Alice, but I didn’t find any of them likeable, which is good because it means I had a plethora of suspects up my sleeve, and you start to think if any of them are what they say they are.
What I found interesting was how Katherine had plotted it. Normally in books you get a bit of build-up and we get to know our characters before the thing happens. But in this, the break-in has already happened, the death has already happened, which means Katherine has had to make the rest of the book as gripping as the start, which can’t have been easy.
It I told mostly from Alice’s POV but there are a few others, and I can be on the fence with multiple POVs because I get confused by them easily, but they work really well here and they’re really easy to follow.
My first Faulkner book but I’ll definitely be looking for her others. This goes on my pile of highly enjoyable thrillers and I would recommend it to anyone who is a fan of Lisa Jewell, for example.
Books By Your Bedside 