The realism is what lifts it. Several listeners with personal experience of stalking say the same thing in the reviews, and it is worth passing on: the portrayal of what the police can and cannot do, and the way a determined person works the system around a restraining order, is accurate and unglamorous. The novel understands that the exhausting part of being stalked is not the danger but the administration of it, the phone calls and the paperwork and the assumption that you are overreacting until something breaks. That is a much harder thing to write than a chase, and Denzil writes it well.

Amber's relationship with her seven-year-old daughter is the emotional engine, and it is handled without sentimentality. Teaching a child to call for help is a horrifying thing to have to do, and the book knows it, which makes the domestic scenes considerably more tense than the confrontations. The arrangement of the house, which could easily have been a gimmick, becomes a portrait of a woman who has decided that fear is a project rather than a feeling. Maimie McCoy's sections in particular carry that controlled flatness well.

My reservation is the ending, and it is shared by a fair number of listeners. The build is long and deliberate, which I liked, and then the payoff arrives smaller than the setup deserves. One Goodreads reviewer put it as a slow buildup before a tense finale that then fizzles out rather than ending with a bang, after expecting some kind of turn; another admitted wanting more and finding that even the climax fell a little flat for them, adding the sharper observation that a book called The Safe Room uses the safe room itself remarkably little. That last point is the more damaging one, because the title makes a promise the plot does not keep: the room is a symbol of the preparation, and the preparation is the best thing in the novel, but the story does not build to the moment where it matters. I finished it satisfied with the journey and mildly cheated by the destination.

Content notes, because the subject matter is not decorative: this is a novel about a man who has pursued a woman since she was a girl, with threats, surveillance and violence, and it contains a scene of domestic assault. Nothing is gratuitous and the book is clearly on the side of its protagonist, but it is genuinely upsetting material, and it is worth knowing that going in.

For listeners who like their thrillers psychological and domestic rather than procedural, and who value atmosphere over a big twist. Eight and a half hours is a comfortable evening or two. If you want the same subject treated by a different hand, the site's It Could Have Been Her and On a Quiet Street are both in the same neighbourhood.