The Lying Room

August 19, 2019
Family drama and office politics take center stage in this tense standalone from the pseudonymous French, the husband-and-wife writing team of Nicci Gerrard and Sean French (the Frieda Klein series). Neve Connolly’s discreet affair with her married boss, Saul Stevenson, was meant to relieve her stress at being the family’s primary breadwinner and main parent to three challenging children, while her illustrator husband, Fletcher, goes on endless job interviews. Then she finds Saul murdered in his London apartment. Fearing the affair will become public, destroying her marriage and devastating her emotionally fragile daughter, Mabel, she scrubs the apartment of every bit of her presence. But she forgets her signature piece of jewelry. When she returns for it, it’s missing, as is the murder weapon that was lying next to the body. Neve’s co-workers wonder what will happen to them, since Saul’s company only recently acquired their firm, while she worries she’ll be the primary suspect. French makes Neve a fully rounded character through her relationships with friends and colleagues, though Neve’s family dynamics stoop to the melodramatic. Fans of domestic thrillers will be rewarded. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary.

October 7, 2019

"Frieda Klein" series author French's thrilling stand-alone features Neve Connolly, a married woman with three children who is approaching middle age. Her marriage has become boring, so when Saul, her boss, begins to show Neve some attention, one thing leads to another, and they begin an affair. One day, Neve gets a text message to come to Saul's apartment, so she sneaks away from her family to meet him. But instead of a romantic rendezvous, Neve finds Saul murdered. In an attempt to keep her infidelity secret, Neve hastily cleans up the crime scene and removes everything belonging to her. Having believed she's left no trace of her existence in Saul's life, she tries to go on with things as normal. Once Saul's body is discovered and the police start investigating, Neve lies to everyone--family, friends, the police. As her web of deceit grows, she's overwhelmed and compelled to find the murderer on her own.

VERDICT This well-written, psychological thriller has a gripping plot that will satisfy fans of Val McDermid and Sharon J. Bolton. [See Prepub Alert, 4/8/19.]--Joni Gheen, LadyJ's Bookish Nook, McConnelsville, OH

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2019
Having ended the saga of forensic psychologist Frieda Klein on a suitably harrowing note (Day of the Dead, 2018), French produces a stand-alone that's just as suspenseful, especially because there's no franchise heroine whose survival is assured. Summoned by a peremptory text to her lover's Covent Garden pied à terre the morning after they've enjoyed an assignation as satisfying as it is secret, Neve Jennifer Connolly finds Saul Stevenson bashed to death with a hammer. At the point of dialing 999, Neve takes a moment to think what the news of her affair and her inevitable involvement in the police inquiry will do to her husband, mostly jobless painter/decorator/illustrator Fletcher Connolly, their two young sons, Rory and Connor, and mainly their daughter, Mabel, a child with a troubled teen history who's just now packing her things to move to university--and then decides on a completely different plan of action. She removes every trace that she's ever been in the place, scrubs it clean of her fingerprints (and everyone else's), then goes back home, returns to her domestic rounds, and is lying in bed next to Fletcher that night before she's realizing that she's left a unique and easily identified bangle bracelet at the flat. That's only the first of many twists best left to readers to discover as French ramps up the nightmare sense of claustrophobia that dogs Neve's every movement and intensifies each pang of guilt and second-guessing. Neve is swiftly entangled in a thicket of lies to DCI Alastair Hitching; to her co-workers at Sans Serif, the partnership Saul's firm Redfern Publishers took over; to Saul's wife, Bernice, who confides in Neve that she thinks her husband's been having an affair and asks her to look out for who his partner might have been; and to the very family she's straining her every nerve to protect. Long before the end, the sorely tried heroine realizes, "I can't trust anyone." Neither can the expertly manipulated reader.

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September 1, 2019
What's a woman to do when she leaves for a morning tryst and finds her lover, who's also her boss, murdered in his London flat where they had made love just the night before? The first thought of Neve Connolly?wife, mother, worker?is to call authorities. But then she considers the effects of the revelation of her affair, particularly on her daughter, Mabel, who has gone through tumultuous times as a teenager and is about to leave for university. So Neve frantically cleans the flat to remove all traces of herself, leaving the hammer that is the presumed murder weapon. Only later does she realize that she left her distinctive bangle bracelet there, but when she returns, she finds both the bangle and the hammer gone. So the lying starts, even in the face of DCI Alastair Hitching's questioning, and even after Neve realizes that her lover wasn't the intended victim. This stand-alone from the team of Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, authors of the Frieda Klein series, delivers engaging characters, a complex story, and steadily increasing suspense. International best-seller French belongs on every thriller fan's TBR list.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)