The Optician's Wife by Betsy Reavley
Every single thing about Deborah Campaign seems to be ordinary. If they notice her at all, people see frizzy hair, a slightly pear-shaped build, charity shop clothes and an unremarkable checkout girl in Woolworths. At home, in the anonymous terraced house in a quiet Cambridge…
Baby Doll
Written by Hollie Overton — Twins have loomed large in some of fiction’s finest moments. Who can forget that creepy pair in Stephen King’s The Shining, and how about David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers for unnerving? SK Tremayne’s The Ice Twins – one of my favourite crime…
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: A Novel
Written by AJ Hartley and David Hewson, narrated by Richard Armitage — OK, OK, before you say, “been there, done that Hamlet thing—five times, maybe 10,” this is another Hamlet animal altogether. As an inveterate audiobook fan, I will say that the Hartley/Hewson Macbeth, narrated…
SK Tremayne's latest trick
You wouldn’t think it possible given the quality of SK Tremayne’s first psychological thriller, The Ice Twins, but the author has come up with something potentially even cleverer. Riffing on that twins theme, SK Tremayne has actually gone out and written two identical books. They’ve…
Epiphany Jones by Michael Grothaus
Epiphany has a mutilated ear, hair as dark as a raven’s wing and hears voices from God, telling her what to do next. Jerry is incredibly lonely, addicted to celebrity porn sites and never quite sure what is real and what is hallucination. These two…
My Husband's Wife by Jane Corry
Two people. One not yet in her teens. Another, recently married, trying to succeed at being both a wife and a lawyer. Carla Cavoletti is a solitary little girl, living alone with her mother in their London flat, and disliked at school for her Italian…
Angel by Anita Waller
A good measure of how much a book affects you is how much of it stays with you months, or years, later. Anita Waller’s debut Beautiful, which I reviewed here for New Talent November last year, is full of the kind of scenes that you…