PSYCHO THRILLERS

CHRISTENA APPLEYARD

OUR HOUSE by Louise Candlish

(Simon and Schuster £12.99) TO SOME women, their house is more precious than their husband. That’s the brutally simple idea behind this pacy mystery set among the property- obsessed couples of an affluent London suburb.

Facing a divorce, and not wanting to lose her home, Fi Lawson opts for the fashionable solution of ‘bird’s nest custody’, which means she and her ex-husband, Bram, take it in turns to live half the week each with their children in the house.

Then, suddenly, her husband disappears — and, worse still, he has sold the home behind her back.

Candlish is an expert on the psychological flaws of these types of couples and she doesn’t shrink from posing uncomfortable questions about modern marriage. This very original storyline is a winner.

ALL THE BEAUTIFUL LIES by Peter Swanson

(Faber £12.99) THIS disturbing book owes much to Lolita, Nabokov’s controversial classic, and bears little resemblance to Swanson’s past bestsellers, such as The kind Worth killing.

The story centres on the inappropriate relationships between harry and his stepmother, Alice, an attractive, highfunctioning sociopath and, before that, Alice and her creepy stepfather.

We follow harry’s somewhat half-hearted attempt to discover who killed his father by pushing him off a cliff in their hometown of coastal Maine. one of the difficulties is that all the possible murder suspects are deeply flawed.

however, the real mystery underpinning this gripping tale concerns the strange relationships. Swanson is no Nabokov, but his writing is meticulous and alert — it’s just a shame that this story has one too many weirdos.

THE FEAR by C.L. Taylor

(Avon £7.99) BOOKS inspired by true events tend to provoke a powerful for- or- against reaction in readers.

If you weren’t interested in the case of the teacher Jeremy Forrest, who triggered an international manhunt in 2012 when he ran off to France with his 15-yearold pupil, you probably won’t care about what might have happened to his student when she grew up and he got out of jail.

This is an imaginary account of how the now grown-up girl, here named Lou, might have reacted when she goes on to witness her former lover grooming a 13-year-old.

There are clever insights, and the book is touching in parts, but, sadly, the plot is a bit of a stretch and ultimately disappoints.