Slightly disappointing

I absolutely loved this writer’s early tense thrillers, so I was excited to see that she had written another stand-alone novel, not connected to a series involving the same character. It was a fairly good listen, and very well read, but somehow it lacks the page-turning quality of her early works, which I sometimes sat through the night to finish. Instead, this just seemed to be a bit dreary, with a vague sense of threat. Possibly, I am just so fed up with the same old theme within ‘psychological thrillers’ of threatened or missing children. This is usually coupled with violence, bullying or coercion from a male (in this case two men) against a female character, usually in a domestic setting. Yes, these situations are very often horribly real in our every day world, but surely thriller writers are capable of creating different scenarios, otherwise the description of ‘thriller’ doesn’t really apply, because the stories are so predictable. This isn’t a bad book by any means, but it’s just very standard, and I think Nicci French is capable of producing something much more exceptional.

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