Mother’s RUIN
WOULD YOU KILL TO PROTECT YOUR CHILD?
Have you noticed how if you read a lot of domestic thrillers, they can all start to feel a bit samey? I’ve lost count of the number of books I’ve come across where a husband has turned out not to be the man the woman thought she married. So the set-up of The Heights intrigued me straight away because it was something completely different.
Ellen Saint has a lovely husband, a good relationship with her ex and two great kids. Her life in London is comfortable, middle-class and content... until Kieran Watts appears on the scene and ruins everything.
Kieran is a disadvantaged kid who gets buddied up with Ellen’s son Lucas at school. From the outset she can’t stand him. She thinks Kieran is a toxic influence on her son, rude and nasty. As the two boys grow closer, Ellen’s hatred turns increasingly obsessive and she blames Kieran for everything that goes wrong in her son’s life.
The story opens with a terrific hook. It is years later Ellen has spotted a grown-up Kieran Watts standing on the roof of a London building. But it can’t be Kieran because he is dead. Ellen knows that because she is the one who killed him.
The story then casts back to how it all went wrong.
It is told mostly from Ellen’s point of view, in the form of a memoir she is writing, and also partly from the perspective of her ex-partner Vic. And it is done so cleverly that your sympathies keep shifting as the truth and lies are gradually revealed
There are dizzying twists, of course, and a good dose of tension, but what makes this an addictive read is the realistically flawed characters and the ethical dilemmas they find themselves facing. If justice fails you is revenge ever justified? How far should a parent go to protect their child?
The Heights is my first Louise Candlish novel and I burnt through its pages.
It is sophisticated, original and, unlike many other psychological thrillers, unnervingly believable.