The premise is the classic one, a woman convinced her husband is lying, but the book is smarter than the premise. Cora is not a saint and does not pretend to be; Paige's grief is written as a force that makes her unreliable rather than merely sad; and Georgia, who could have been a device, keeps doing things that make no sense until they suddenly do. The construction of the mystery is what impressed me most: it plants the evidence in plain sight and trusts you to be annoyed with yourself later, which is the mark of a thriller that respects its reader.

Where I land with the criticism that has followed this book around is honest ambivalence. The recurring complaint from reviewers is that the characters are hard to warm to, and I read one blog review that put it plainly: the reviewer found it difficult to relate to them. I understand it. These are people who make terrible decisions in sequence and keep secrets from the police, and if you need to like everyone you spend eleven hours with, this will test you. What I would argue is that the unlikeability is the engine here, not a flaw: a neighbourhood thriller where everybody is pleasant would have nothing to hide.

Imogen Church's narration is the reason I would recommend the audio over the page. She reads suspense without straining for it, keeps the three voices distinct without impersonation, and manages the tonal shift when the book stops being about a suspected affair and starts being about something considerably worse. If you like this kind of thing, The Divorce by Freida McFadden is on the site and is a natural next listen; the publisher name-checks McFadden on this very cover, so the comparison is theirs, not mine.