Book Review: THE LYING ROOM by Nicci French

Title: THE LYING ROOM

Author: Nicci French
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia
Read: September 2019

Expected publication: 1 October 2019

My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 all the stars!

Book Description:

It should have been just a mid-life fling. A guilty indiscretion that Neve Connolly could have weathered. An escape from twenty years of routine marriage to her overworked husband, and from her increasingly distant children. But when Neve pays a morning-after visit to her lover, Saul, and finds him brutally murdered, their pied-à-terre still heady with her perfume, all the lies she has so painstakingly stitched together threaten to unravel.

After scrubbing clean every trace of her existence from Saul’s life—and death—Neve believes she can return to normal, shaken but intact. But she can’t get out of her head the one tormenting question: what was she forgetting?

An investigation into the slaying could provide the answer. It’s brought Detective Chief Inspector Alastair Hitching, and Neve’s worst fears, to her door. But with every new lie, every new misdirection to save herself, Neve descends further into the darkness of her betrayal—and into more danger than she ever imagined. Because Hitching isn’t the only one watching Neve. So is a determined killer who’s about to make the next terrifying move in a deadly affair….

My musings:

Let me begin by saying that I have been a huge Nicci French fan ever since reading THE MEMORY GAME over twenty years ago, and I have read each and every book by this fantastic writer duo as soon as they came out ever since. You can therefore imagine my delight when I received an ARC of their latest novel THE LYING ROOM from Netgalley! And I am even more delighted to say that it was another five star read for me!

To truly appreciate Nicci French novels you must know that these are slow burning, character driven mysteries. Their power lies in the keen observation of the details of ordinary people living their everyday lives. Getting up, eating breakfast, going to work, bathtime with the kids, a silly argument with your spouse, reading in your flannelette pyjamas. Boring, Except that it’s not. Because among those ordinary people usually hides evil. Ordinary person next door or psychopath? Sometimes it seems to be a very fine line. But it’s those small details that bring the characters to life, make them relatable, ratchet up tension. If it can happen to them, it could happen to us. Ordinary lives spiralling out of control through just one small decision, one white lie, one step in the wrong direction. It’s then that the ordinary becomes sinister, terrifying, the stuff of nightmares.

THE LYING ROOM is no different.  Here, our main character is Neve, a middle-aged woman and mother living an ordinary existence in London. After twenty or so years of marriage, the relationship has become a bit stale and routine. After a recent merger at work, even her job has lost its excitement, and the colleagues she has known since college are all getting older, too. Her oldest child is on the verge of leaving home, whilst the younger ones are firmly entrenched in a routine of school and homework and hanging out with friends. So is it really so surprising that Neve has a quick guilty fling with her boss, who for a moment or two makes her feel desired, and beautiful, and exciting? It would probably have all taken its course, except that one morning Neve receives a text from her lover to go and see him urgently. When she gets to his flat, she finds him dead on the floor, brutally stabbed to death.

What would you do? Call the police and confess your affair, risking your marriage, your career, the respect of your friends and children? Or leave, hide, pretend this has never happened?

Neve makes her choice, and her life will never be the same again. Like the gentle flutter of butterfly wings, her actions will have consequences and cause an avalanche of extraordinary events in her ordinary life. Slowly but inevitably, the line of dominos is tumbling, faster and faster until everything will come crashing down. It’s this gradual unravelling that creates almost unbearable tension that characterises Nicci French’s books and which always makes me come back for more. That, and the foray into the darker corners of the human psyche that make you look at your neighbours, your colleagues, your friends a bit closer, more suspiciously. Can you really be sure to recognise the psychopath in your midst?

THE LYING ROOM lived up to all my expectations and more. I devoured it. It may be a slow burner, but this small simmering fire soon consumed me and made me read frantically until late into the night. I couldn’t get enough of this book!

Summary:

All in all, THE LYING ROOM was a clever, multi layered, descriptive domestic noir story that may have simmered slowly but with such tension that it really got under my skin – like only Nicci French can! With everyday details that could have been taken from my life, or yours, or the person next door’s, one decision causes an avalanche of events that will have your reading late into the night – right to its terrifying finale. A masterful psychological thriller I enjoyed immensely!

Thank you to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster Australia for the free electronic copy of this novel and for giving me the opportunity to provide an honest review.