This psychological suspense thriller, by B.A. Paris, was published in 2021. My audio-version was excellently narrated, mostly by Olivia Dowd, but with a quick contribution from Thomas Judd when a definitively male narrator makes a brief appearance.

The story focuses on a woman called Alice, who agrees to move, with her relatively new partner, Leo, to a house in a gated community in London, only to find that a woman called Nina was murdered in that very residence two years earlier. Worse, this was a circumstance Leo knew about, but failed to mention... The murdered woman, a therapist, was married to Oliver. When he commits suicide, the gesture is taken as a confession of guilt. But many loose ends remain, and there are definite grounds for assuming the real killer is still out there -- and maybe very close at hand.

This brutal history combines with a stream of little mysteries to well and truly unsettle Alice, who is somewhat vulnerable because of her own tragic past (she lost her parents and sister in a car crash). She starts to obsess about the murder, turning her suspicious gaze to almost every other character in the course of the story. Which is not hard to do, given the oppressively claustrophobic nature of "The Circle", from whose 12 residences someone always seems to be watching...


Not Finsbury Park, but still plenty of scope for eyes at windows...

The novel is really well constructed, with each of the fairly short chapters ending in a cliffhanger, or question, or other device calculated to make you listen on. The tension builds nicely.

About half-way through, I figured out the identity of our miscreant, but I'd never have worked out the modus operandi, which is complex in the extreme...

That's one of my beefs about the book, actually. The ending is way too melodramatic. I often find this. You get a beautifully creepy build-up, all the more effective for being very realistic, grounded in the day-to-day minutiae of making coffee, lunching with friends, answering your mobile -- only to have the whole thing explode at the end in a riot of bizarreness.

And all the way through, Alice is just way too brave to be credible... In her position, I would not have been asking snoopy questions, and once I suspected someone was regularly getting into the house, I would have been out of there before the butter melted on my toast.

Some reviewers find her irritating as well as foolhardy. And yes, personally, I don't understand people who don't finish their cake, and it's true that she says "lovely" and "perfect" rather a lot. But I liked the element of vulnerability that past trauma has given her, which makes her both very easy to manipulate and open to accusations of being a fantasist.

Punctuating Alice's I-account are interstices called "Past", which give a therapist-eye view of sessions with clients. Perhaps because I was listening rather than reading, I didn't at first pick up on the creepily cynical tone of these. It was only in retrospect that I thought of them with a bit of a shudder.

Take-home message: Don't trust anyone, because you might just have stumbled on a psychopath, and he/she might be really messing with you...


Possibly better therapy...