Published By: Doubleday
Pages: 272
Released On: 15/01/2026
To get your dream life, you need that killer instinct.
Let’s be real. House hunting is a special kind of hell. After a year and a half, and more failed bids than she cares to count, Margo is officially losing it. Then, a tip-off: a perfect house, off-market, that Margo just knows will save her and Ian’s marriage, and get her life, career and plan to have a baby back on track.
A little stalking? Harmless! A bit of trespassing? Necessary! But when Margo’s scheming hits a snag, she is pushed to her breaking point. As her methods get increasingly unhinged, it’s clear that nothing is off limits. It’s not her fault she’s just doing what it takes.
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I had such high hopes for this book but sadly it didn’t live up to them.
I didn’t find the dialogue very natural. I mean, I find dialogue incredibly hard to write so it’s not like I can really offer advice. But I was very aware I was reading a book – which sounds weird I know, but I like to lose myself in a book, a conversation, and forget I’m reading a fictional conversation, and with this one, I was very aware it wasn’t real.
I kept flitting between feeling compassion for our protagonists and not. I mean, I have never bought a house so I can’t say I understand what the house bidding market is like, although I have seen other people doing it and so can understand it can be crushing. But when they’re complaining about having to have a $1.3 million budget, it felt hard to feel sorry for them.
It takes a long time to get going, with setting the scene and the characters and whatnot. I was waiting for something to happen. It did improve as it went along yes, but the fact that it took so long and I was considering DNF-ing it sort of overshadows that. It was a bit “too little too late”.
Margo was an extremely unlikeable character. I did want to stay with her and find out if they did get the house, but I didn’t care much about her, and I found myself not caring if she did succeed or not because she was so unbearable. All of the other characters, whilst not quite as unlikeable, didn’t stand out for me, but it would have been nice to see some of their POVs once in a while. Especially Margo’s husband Ian he gets pushed to the back because of Margo’s moaning all the time and I just found she got monotonous.
The pacing is uneven. Some bits are drawn out and far too long and rambling, and other bits disappeared in the blink of an eye and we don’t get time to invest in it.
I really did want to know how it ended, but I can’t say I overly enjoyed the journey to get there.
I thought this was going to be a darkly humorous thriller and it just wasn’t. I didn’t get that at all. It wasn’t funny and it wasn’t thrilling.. And I think that is it’s main issue, it’s not marketed right. For me this is not a thriller, it is a contemporary piece of writing with the odd suspicious element. And I was worried that Marisa was going to throw in some thriller elements right at the end, and that’s what happened. At about 90% through it became a 100 MPH thriller and I found that worse than if it was zero thriller. It’s like she got to the end and panicked that she hadn’t put anything in that would make it a thriller and so rammed it in there, and so it felt like the ending to a completely different book.
I have seen some reviews that give it 5 stars and others 2, so it’s clearly going to be a divisive book with some loving it and others hating it. I won’t say I hated it, because I didn’t, I’d say it’s on the lower side of fair to middling. It was okay and got better as it went along, but I was really disappointed as to what it promised and failed to achieve.
Books By Your Bedside 