The Psychological Thrillers you won’t be able to get out of your head this month: Kate
THE STALKER by Kate Rhodes (Simon & Schuster £22, 384pp)
Don’t be deterred by the boring title of Kate Rhodes’s new thriller.
The story centres on Dr Eloise Shaw and her relationships with her exquisitely messed up family, her unfaithful husband and dubious friends after she becomes the victim of a dangerous stalker.
The big twist being that Shaw herself is a famous expert on stalking. So when she receives an anonymous message saying ‘Me or You’ she is suddenly forced to pit her professional expertise as well as her personal experience against the stalker.
Part of the fun of the plot is that all her close circle are equally suspicious characters.
Rhodes gives a compelling insight into the mind of the stalker and tells a good story along the way. Shame about the title, it should have been called ‘Me Or You’.
Stalked: When the hunted becomes the hunter…
A PLACE CALLED HOPE by Morgan Greene (Canelo £9.99, 384pp)
It’s hard to believe when reading this beautifully evocative story of desperate young lives in a dying small town in America that the writer is actually from Wales.
Morgan Greene has a similar gift to James Graham (Sherwood etc) for getting inside the mind of a landscape even if it’s not his own.
Eighteen-year-old Lucas Caldwell thinks he is condemned never to leave the dump of his home town because he has to look after his young brother Reuben.
Then one day his grandfather tells him about a painting worth millions of pounds that was stolen decades earlier. And suddenly Lucas sees a future. But he must share the secret with others.
What follows is an extraordinary, tension-filled account of how greed and violence and sometimes hope itself can make a mockery of the so-called American dream. A story that will thrill you and maybe break your heart.
UNSOUND by Heather Critchlow (Canelo £9.99, 336pp)
Cal Lovett is a true crime podcaster who specialises in missing persons cases. He is called in by the parents of
Arran, who disappeared without trace 20 years ago when he was a student at Edinburgh University.
Cal’s motivation for his work is the unsolved murder of his sister Margot.
The story is told in two parts, with Cal gradually discovering some gruesome and shocking secrets about Arran’s life.
Cal’s own narrative is a slower burn and, although he is a well-written character, it would probably help to read the first two books in the same series rather than just this as a standalone.