PSYCHO THRILLERS  – Jan 16, 2020

PSYCHO THRILLERS

THE WOODS by Vanessa Savage (Sphere £16.99, 400 pp)

THE WOODS

by Vanessa Savage (Sphere £16.99, 400 pp)

There is a cool directness about Savage’s writing that is making her name in a very competitive field. She creates believable characters and spooky atmospheres with immediate effect, hooking her readers from the first page and keeping them dangling until the very end. She did it with The Woman In The Dark and this book is, if anything, more gripping.

We encounter the main character, Tess, ten years after the accidental death of her sister. We know immediately that she is probably not a reliable narrator.

Circumstances force her to return reluctantly to the scene of her sister’s death and confront the memories she has been suppressing. This is the complex story of a dysfunctional family and reveals the true events of what happened when two girls went into a wood and only one came out alive.

HAVEN’T THEY GROWN 

by Sophie Hannah (Hodder £16.99, 336 pp)

Sophie Hannah is one of this country’s most accomplished writers and one of the few who could pull off such an impossible sounding mystery.

The main character, Beth, becomes obsessed with the life of her one-time close friend Flora, who decamped to Florida with her children after her estrangement from Beth. When Flora returns 12 years later, her children Thomas and Emily look exactly the same and are still aged five and three.

In summary the plot sounds bonkers but it’s testament to Hannah’s skill that she creates such a convincing narrative, cleverly manages the suspense and deals with so many contemporary themes. And she hasn’t lost her knack for sending the reader in the wrong direction.

THE OTHER YOU

by J.S.Monroe (Head of Zeus £18.99, 496 pp)

Until she suffered a brain injury in a car accident, Katy was what is called a super recogniser — someone enlisted by the police to use her gifts for picking out criminals in huge crowds.

We meet her recovering from the crash in a high-tech house with her seemingly perfect partner, Rob. Her world is threatened when she begins to suspect that Rob is not actually Rob.

This is a clever mash-up of psychological thriller and police procedural with a dash of sci-fi. The imaginatively constructed plot and the carefully written character of Katy prompt some disturbing and unusual questions about who we trust and why in our rapidly changing world of everyday technological progress.

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