Minnie's Fiction Addiction

👀 First impressions:
Sarah Vaughan has been an auto-buy author for me ever since Anatomy of a Scandal, so when I heard about Based on a True Story I didn’t even need to read the blurb. Of course I read it anyway, and it sounded delicious. Dame Eleanor Kingman is a beloved children’s author. Her bestselling books about a mother fox and her cubs have built her a multimillion pound empire. She’s about to turn seventy and is throwing a lavish birthday party at her clifftop manor in Cornwall, and a documentary crew is arriving to capture her life story.

Then, the night before the party, an anonymous email lands in her inbox. It threatens to expose a secret she has kept for more than fifty years, one that sits at the very heart of her career. The prologue tells us a body will be found on the beach after the celebrations. So the question hanging over everything is not just who sent that email, but who won’t make it to the morning.

I went in expecting a slick, twisty family drama with Vaughan’s trademark moral grey areas. That’s pretty much what I got, just with a slower, more simmering approach than I’d expected.

✅ What I Liked:
The setting is gorgeous. It has a storm-battered Cornish manor, a big family gathering, cliffs and crashing waves, and a house full of people who all have a reason to be resentful. It’s the perfect pressure cooker, and Vaughan uses it brilliantly. You can almost feel the air getting heavier as the party approaches.

Eleanor herself is a fascinating creation. She’s spent decades crafting a public image as the warm, nurturing woman behind cosy children’s stories. So much of the book’s bite comes from the gap between that persona and the woman we see in private. I loved how the novel plays with the idea of truth and fiction, and how much of what we call “inspiration” is really borrowed, taken or reshaped from real lives. The title is doing a lot of clever work here.

Then there are her three daughters, Gilly, Rachel and Delia, and this is where the book really shines for me. Each one has her own secrets and grievances, and the way their chapters weave in alongside Eleanor’s gives the story real depth. There are some lovely nods to King Lear running through the book: an ageing parent, three daughters and a legacy to fight over. Once I spotted them I couldn’t stop seeing them. They give the whole thing a slightly literary edge without ever feeling heavy.

The suspect list is also nicely stacked. There’s an estranged literary agent, an ex-husband, a nanny who was dismissed years ago, and of course the daughters themselves. My suspicions kept shifting from one person to another, and when the party finally arrives, all that carefully built tension absolutely explodes. Vaughan times her reveals so well, and the ending felt satisfying and earned.

❎ What I didn’t Like:
This is very much a slow burn. If you pick it up expecting a breakneck thriller, you might find the first half a little leisurely. There’s a lot of groundwork being laid, and while it pays off, I sometimes wished things would hurry along to the party.

I also have to be honest and say that this book is full of people who are not especially nice. Eleanor is complicated at best, and most of the family have their flaws on full display. I enjoy a morally messy cast, but there were moments when I struggled to find someone to root for. The family dog was probably the most lovable character in the house, which says a lot!

The story shifts between timelines and points of view, so it can take a little while to work out who’s who and how everyone connects. Once it clicked I was hooked, but it’s worth giving it a few chapters.

📚 Why You Should Read This Book:
If you loved Anatomy of a Scandal or Reputation, this sits comfortably alongside them, with a bit of the domestic intensity of Little Disasters mixed in. It’s ideal for readers who like their suspense character-driven and their families dysfunctional, and who enjoy a big gathering where everything goes wrong. Fans of Lucy Foley’s The Guest List or Liane Moriarty’s family dramas should feel right at home here.

It would also make a brilliant book club pick. There’s so much to talk about, from the ethics of storytelling to the pressures of motherhood and who really owns a story. I can see it sparking some very lively debates.

💭 Final Thoughts:
Based on a True Story is a clever, atmospheric and quietly unsettling novel about power, privilege, motherhood and the stories we tell to protect ourselves. It asks some thought-provoking questions about truth and fiction, and it wraps them up in a juicy family drama with a body on the beach for good measure. The pace won’t suit everyone and the characters are hard to love, but the payoff is worth it. I closed the book still turning Eleanor over in my mind. Another strong one from Sarah Vaughan.

Final Rating ★★★★ – Stormy, simmering, and packed with family secrets

About the Reviewer

Minnie

📸

Book lover, chronic over-reader, and firm believer that the best stories are the ones that leave a mark. I review fiction across all genres with a soft spot for anything character-driven and emotionally complex. Want to know more? Head over to my About page to learn the full story.

This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through these links, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This helps support the blog and allows me to keep sharing book recommendations.

👀 First impressions:
I will admit that I came to The Madman with fairly high expectations. Henning Mankell is a name that carries enormous weight in Scandinavian crime fiction, and his Kurt Wallander series cemented him as one of the most important voices in Nordic noir. The Madman sits outside that beloved series, and that alone made me curious. What would Mankell do without his most famous detective to anchor the story? The premise drew me in immediately: a tale that blends moral complexity with the raw, unforgiving landscape that Mankell does so well. I settled in expecting atmosphere by the bucketload, and a narrative that would press on some uncomfortable truths about human nature.

✅ What I Liked:
Mankell’s prose is, as ever, quietly devastating. There is no showmanship here, no need to impress with flourishes or clever wordplay. Instead he writes with a kind of stripped-back precision that makes every sentence feel purposeful and earned. The pacing in the first half of the book is genuinely masterful, drawing you deep into the world before you even realise how invested you have become in the characters. The moral ambiguity running through the story is where Mankell truly shines. He resists the urge to offer easy answers, and his characters are flawed in ways that feel completely human rather than contrived. The Swedish landscape, as always, functions almost as a character in its own right: bleak, beautiful, and quietly menacing in a way that perfectly mirrors the emotional terrain of the story.

❎ What I didn’t Like:
There are moments in the second half where the narrative loses a little of its momentum. Certain plot threads feel underdeveloped, as if Mankell introduced ideas that deserved more room to breathe but were ultimately left to resolve themselves a little too neatly. A couple of the secondary characters felt thinly sketched in comparison to the central figures, which was a mild frustration given how richly the main cast was drawn. For readers who prefer a faster, more plot-driven read, there may also be stretches that feel slow. Mankell is a writer who asks you to sit with discomfort rather than rush through it, and that is not always an easy ask.

📚 Why You Should Read This Book:
If you are a fan of literary crime fiction that prioritises psychological depth over action, this book deserves a place on your shelf. Readers who love the moody introspection of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, or who enjoyed Jo Nesbø’s darker, more character-focused work, will find a lot to appreciate here. It is also a strong choice for anyone who wants to explore Mankell beyond the Wallander series and see what he could do when freed from that familiar structure. This is a book for patient readers who enjoy sitting inside a world for a while, rather than racing to the final page.

💭 Final Thoughts:
The Madman is not a perfect book, but it is a deeply considered one, and in many ways that matters more. Mankell brings his trademark thoughtfulness and his gift for atmosphere to every page, and even when the story stumbles slightly, the quality of the writing carries you through. It left me reflective in a way that only the best crime fiction manages to do, lingering long after I had closed the final page. It is the kind of book that rewards readers who are willing to meet it on its own terms.

Final Rating ★★★★ – Dark, deliberate, and quietly unforgettable

About the Reviewer

Minnie

📸

Book lover, chronic over-reader, and firm believer that the best stories are the ones that leave a mark. I review fiction across all genres with a soft spot for anything character-driven and emotionally complex. Want to know more? Head over to my About page to learn the full story.

This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through these links, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This helps support the blog and allows me to keep sharing book recommendations.

👀 First impressions:
I had been circling this one for weeks before I finally picked it up. Honey is Imani Thompson’s debut, and it arrived carrying the kind of hype that usually makes me suspicious. Nearly every outlet with a books page named it one of the most anticipated novels of the year, and the premise alone explains why: a bored Cambridge PhD student accidentally kills a man, discovers she rather likes how it feels, and decides that ridding the world of bad men might be the most meaningful work she has ever done.

Thompson is a British writer of Jamaican heritage who studied sociology at Cambridge and wrote this while working as a bookseller at Daunt Books, which is such a perfect origin story that I almost resented it. Genre wise, it sits in an odd and interesting spot. It is a thriller, but it is also a campus novel, and underneath both of those it is a satire about race, class, gender and the stories we tell ourselves to make our worst impulses feel principled.

What drew me in was the promise of a protagonist I would not be able to sit comfortably with. I wanted to be unsettled. I was not disappointed.

✅ What I Liked:
The voice. Honestly, the voice does most of the heavy lifting here and it is more than up to the job. Yrsa narrates with this dry, exhausted, very funny detachment that makes even the grimmest moments land like a joke you feel guilty for laughing at. Thompson has an ear for the specific texture of academic life, the passive aggression in an email, the performance of a seminar room, the particular loneliness of being the only Black woman in a department that congratulates itself constantly on how progressive it is. That environment is rendered so precisely that it becomes a character in its own right.

The first death is a small masterpiece of writing. It is almost absurd in its execution, involving a bee and a bottle of San Pellegrino, and it happens with a casualness that completely resets your expectations for the book. There is no long agonised buildup. It simply occurs, and then Yrsa has to live inside the aftermath, and the aftermath is where Thompson is genuinely brilliant. The novel is far more interested in what killing does to Yrsa’s sense of herself than in whether she will be caught.

I also appreciated that this is not a mystery. You watch her plan. You watch her rationalise. The tension comes from wondering how far she will go and where the seams will start to show, and that is a much more uncomfortable place to sit than a whodunnit. Thompson keeps the pacing tight throughout, and the academic material she folds in, the feminist theory and the reading on racial violence, never feels like homework. It feels like the scaffolding Yrsa is building around her own behaviour, which is the point.

And the humour. I keep coming back to it. This book is much funnier than a book about serial murder has any right to be.

❎ What I didn’t Like:
The escalation is relentless, and while that is clearly a deliberate choice, there were stretches in the middle where I wanted the novel to slow down and breathe. Each event tumbles into the next at such speed that a few of the deaths start to feel interchangeable, and I lost some of the moral vertigo I had felt so sharply in the opening chapters. A little more stillness would have made the later kills hit harder.

I also found the supporting cast thinner than I wanted. Yrsa is so vividly drawn that the people around her, particularly the men, sometimes function more as arguments than as characters. That works when the satire is running hot, but it occasionally undercuts the novel’s own thesis. If the men are barely people, the question of whether they deserved what happened becomes easier to answer than it should be, and this is a book that is at its best when the answer is difficult.

The ending will divide readers. I will not spoil it, but I finished the last page, sat there for a minute, and could not decide whether I had been given a resolution or a shrug. I have come round to it since. On the night, I was frustrated.

📚 Why You Should Read This Book:
If you loved Promising Young Woman, you should read this immediately. It has the same combination of stylish rage and moral queasiness, and the same refusal to let you feel clean about enjoying it.

More broadly, this is for readers who like their thrillers with a literary spine. If you enjoy morally grey women who are not being quietly redeemed in the background, if Ottessa Moshfegh’s unpleasant narrators appeal to you, if you liked the sharpness of My Sister, the Serial Killer or the academic knife work of Yellowface, you will find a lot to chew on here. Campus novel fans should pick it up too, because the satire of university life is genuinely excellent even when the bodies are not dropping.

It is also, and I mean this as high praise, a fantastic book club pick. I finished it desperate to argue with someone about it.

💭 Final Thoughts:
Honey is a debut that swings hard and connects far more often than it misses. Thompson has written something slippery and provocative that uses a lurid premise to ask serious questions about who gets to claim justice and how easily a political principle can become a personal appetite. It is not a flawless novel. The middle rushes, some characters stay flat, and the ending asks for more generosity than I initially wanted to give it. But it is alive on every page in a way that a lot of tidier books are not, and I would take this over tidy any day.

I read it in two sittings and I have thought about it most days since. That is usually the only review metric that matters to me.

Final Rating ★★★★ – Wickedly funny, morally slippery, and impossible to put down

About the Reviewer

Minnie

📸

Book lover, chronic over-reader, and firm believer that the best stories are the ones that leave a mark. I review fiction across all genres with a soft spot for anything character-driven and emotionally complex. Want to know more? Head over to my About page to learn the full story.

This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through these links, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This helps support the blog and allows me to keep sharing book recommendations.

👀 First impressions:
Don’t Fall in Love with Me is a contemporary romance set almost entirely in the Ardèche region of southern France, and it works from a premise Paige Toon has always handled well: the love that arrives too early and refuses to leave.

Grace has been in love with Jackson since she was fifteen, back when their summers were spent swimming, kayaking and drifting around his grandfather’s chateau. They were best friends, and then he married someone else, and Grace stopped going back. Three years later, Jackson reappears, newly single, with an offer she cannot refuse: her dream job, in the exact place where all of it started. Étienne, another friend from those summers, suggests they fake a relationship in order to make Jackson jealous. The plan works, which is precisely the problem.

Toon has been writing sun-drenched love stories since 2007 and has sold several million copies worldwide, and readers who know Someone I Used to Know or One Perfect Summer will recognise the territory. This one arrives with heavy expectations attached, and it mostly meets them.

✅ What I Liked:
The setting is the strongest element by a wide margin. The Ardèche is rendered with enough specificity that it stops functioning as backdrop and becomes something closer to a character. The rivers, the heat coming off stone, the caves, the slow shapelessness of a French summer afternoon. There is a real skill in making a reader homesick for a place they have never been, and the book manages it repeatedly.

The structure also earns its keep. The narrative moves between the present day and those childhood summers, and the flashbacks are not padding. They establish exactly what Grace and Jackson were to each other at fifteen, at seventeen and at twenty, so that the present day version of them carries weight it would not otherwise have. Underneath the romance sits a sharper idea, which is that the people you loved as a teenager keep living inside you in an outdated form, and meeting the current edition is genuinely disorienting.

Étienne is the book’s best invention. Love triangles usually fail because one option is obviously wrong, and this one holds its uncertainty for a long time. He is charming without being pleased with himself, and the secret he carries reframes a good deal of what precedes it.

The supporting cast deserves credit too. Toon writes chosen family well, and the women here are not accessories to the romance. They have their own lives and the good sense to tell Grace when she is being unreasonable.

❎ What I didn’t Like:
The pacing is slow, and not always productively so. The middle section accumulates detail at the expense of momentum, and there are stretches where the scenery arrives faster than the story does. Readers who need a plot that keeps moving will find this a test.

Grace is a difficult narrator to sit with at times. Her loyalty to Jackson drives the entire book, but it occasionally tips from devotion into passivity, and it takes a long while before she wants anything that is not attached to him. The resolution is satisfying. The wait for it is less so.

Jackson is the weaker point of the triangle. He is written as the golden boy, wealthy and easy and universally adored, and he never quite resolves into a person rather than an idea Grace has been carrying since adolescence. This may be deliberate, since the book is partly about the gap between memory and reality, but it does drain tension from the central question of whether they will end up together.

Set against Toon’s back catalogue, this is a lovely book rather than a devastating one. The emotional payload is lighter than her best work.

📚 Why You Should Read This Book:
This is a holiday in book form, and it suits a sun lounger, a long train journey or a grey month when you need to be somewhere warmer.

It will land well with readers who enjoy childhood friends to lovers, second chance romance, love triangles with two credible options, and slow burns that make you wait. Fans of Beth O’Leary, Abby Jimenez, Jill Mansell and Carley Fortune are in the right neighbourhood, and Fortune readers in particular will recognise the layered summers structure.

It also works as an entry point. No knowledge of Toon’s other books is required, and it gives a fair sense of what she does.

Worth knowing before you buy: it is steamier than much of her earlier work and heavier than the cover suggests. There is grief here, and family complication, and it is not a light read.

💭 Final Thoughts:
This is an atmospheric, emotionally intelligent romance that is unhurried to a fault. The setting is superb, the structure is smart, and Étienne quietly takes over a book he was not obviously built to lead. Against that, Grace’s passivity and Jackson’s thinness make the central romance less compelling than the world it happens in.

What lingers afterwards is not the love story so much as the sense of a place you loved as a child and cannot return to on the same terms. Toon handles that loss with real delicacy, and it is the reason this stays worth recommending despite its slower stretches.

Final Rating ★★★★ – Sun-soaked, slow-burning, and quietly heartbreaking

About the Reviewer

Minnie

📸

Book lover, chronic over-reader, and firm believer that the best stories are the ones that leave a mark. I review fiction across all genres with a soft spot for anything character-driven and emotionally complex. Want to know more? Head over to my About page to learn the full story.

This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through these links, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This helps support the blog and allows me to keep sharing book recommendations.

👀 First impressions:
When I spotted The Island Retreat on the shelves, it felt like exactly the kind of book I needed. The premise is irresistible: six strangers arrive at a luxury villa on Corfu, each hoping that a week of therapy, sunshine, and writing their life stories will somehow fix what is broken inside them. Running the whole thing is Rose Talisman, a former TV therapist whose career imploded five years earlier in a very public and very catastrophic way. She has staked everything on this retreat. If it fails, she loses it all.

Cathy Kelly is a bestselling Irish author with over twenty novels under her belt, and she is known for writing warm, emotionally rich stories about real women navigating messy, complicated lives. I have enjoyed her work before, so I went into this one with high hopes and a cup of tea, fully expecting to be swept away to the Greek islands for a few hundred pages.

✅ What I Liked:
The setting is absolutely gorgeous. Kelly writes Corfu so vividly that you can practically smell the wild herbs on the hillside and feel the Mediterranean sun on your skin. Villa Artemis, with its sea views and pine trees, is the kind of fictional location that makes you want to open a new tab and start searching for flights. It is the perfect backdrop for a story about people peeling back their layers, and Kelly uses it beautifully.

Where this book really shines, though, is in its characters. Kelly has a gift for writing people who feel instantly recognisable. Each of the six guests arrives carrying their own complicated history, and the slow unravelling of their stories is genuinely compelling. You get to know them through their therapy sessions with Rose, through their interactions with each other over meals and walks, and through the life writing exercises that force them to confront things they have been avoiding for years. There is a lovely sense of community that builds between the guests as the week unfolds, and some of the quieter moments of connection and vulnerability are the most powerful in the whole book.

Rose herself is a fantastic central character. She is not presented as some all knowing healer who has everything figured out. She has her own demons, her own past that she is running from, and the tension between her role as the person who is supposed to help everyone else and her own unresolved pain adds a really satisfying emotional layer to the story. Kelly also explores some genuinely thought provoking ideas about the modern desire to be “fixed,” and whether true healing can happen on a neat timeline, which gives the book more depth than your average beach read.

The warmth and heart that Kelly is known for are here in full force. There are moments of real humour alongside the heavier emotional beats, and the balance between the two feels natural and well judged.

❎ What I didn’t Like:
My biggest issue with the book is pacing. The entire story takes place over roughly one week, and for six guests plus Rose, that is a lot of ground to cover. Some of the characters’ emotional breakthroughs feel like they happen a little too quickly and a little too neatly. Real therapy is slow and messy, and while I understand this is fiction and not a clinical case study, there were moments where I wished Kelly had let things breathe a bit more rather than rushing towards resolution.

Not all six guests receive equal attention, either. Some storylines feel richer and more fully developed than others, and a couple of characters end up feeling more like sketches than fully realised people. Bernard, for example, comes across as quite one note for much of the book, and while his story does eventually take an interesting turn, it takes a while to get there.

There is also a subplot involving someone from Rose’s past making contact, which is meant to add tension and stakes. It works to a degree, but it sometimes feels like it belongs in a slightly different book, and it pulls focus away from the retreat dynamics that are the real heart of the story.

I also found myself wishing Kelly had returned to her signature Irish setting. The Corfu backdrop is lovely, but there is something about her Irish family stories that feels more grounded and specific, and this novel occasionally reads as though it could have been written by any number of women’s fiction authors rather than being distinctly Kelly.

📚 Why You Should Read This Book:
If you love character driven women’s fiction with a beautiful setting and an ensemble cast, this book is absolutely for you. It is a warm, comforting read that still manages to ask some interesting questions about how we deal with our pasts and whether we can truly reinvent ourselves.

Fans of authors like Marian Keyes, Sheila O’Flanagan, and Patricia Scanlan will feel right at home here. If you enjoyed Kelly’s previous novel Sisterhood, this shares a similar warmth and emotional depth. It is also a wonderful choice if you are looking for a holiday read that offers a bit more substance than your typical poolside thriller. Anyone who has ever thought about what it would take to really face the things they have been avoiding will find something to connect with in these pages.

💭 Final Thoughts:
The Island Retreat is a book that does exactly what Cathy Kelly does best: it gathers a group of flawed, relatable people together and lets their stories collide in ways that are moving, entertaining, and ultimately hopeful. The Corfu setting is dreamy, the characters are easy to invest in, and the emotional core of the story is strong. It is not without its flaws. The pacing feels rushed in places, not every character gets the page time they deserve, and a couple of the subplots could have been tightened up. But the overall reading experience is a genuinely enjoyable one. It is the kind of book that leaves you feeling a little warmer and a little more reflective when you put it down, and sometimes that is exactly what you need.

Final Rating ★★★★ – Sun soaked secrets and the slow, beautiful work of learning to heal

About the Reviewer

Minnie

📸

Book lover, chronic over-reader, and firm believer that the best stories are the ones that leave a mark. I review fiction across all genres with a soft spot for anything character-driven and emotionally complex. Want to know more? Head over to my About page to learn the full story.

This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through these links, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This helps support the blog and allows me to keep sharing book recommendations.

👀 First impressions:
After the massive success of First Lie Wins, which became a number one New York Times bestseller and a Reese’s Book Club pick, Ashley Elston was firmly on my radar. So when Anatomy of an Alibi landed, I was genuinely excited to dive in. The premise sounded irresistible: two women from completely different worlds agree to swap places for twelve hours so that one of them, Camille Bayliss, can spy on her controlling lawyer husband, Ben, while the other, Aubrey Price, steps into Camille’s life. Then Ben turns up dead, and suddenly both women need an alibi but only one of them has it. Set in a small Louisiana town dripping with secrets and Southern tension, it promised to be a twisty, atmospheric thriller. I went in expecting something as tight and clever as Elston’s debut, and while there were flashes of that brilliance, this one left me feeling more conflicted than I expected.

✅ What I Liked:
There is no denying that Ashley Elston knows how to plot a thriller. The central concept of the identity swap is genuinely clever, and the opening scene at Chantilly’s Bar, where a glamorous woman everyone assumes is Camille turns out to be someone else entirely, is a fantastic hook. I was pulled in immediately and wanted to know how the whole scheme would unfold.

The pacing in the first half is strong. The book moves quickly, and Elston does a good job of layering in tension as both women’s plans start to unravel. The multiple points of view, including Camille, Aubrey, and Ben’s law partner Hank, give the story a kaleidoscope quality where you are constantly re-evaluating what you thought you knew. Of the cast, Hank was a standout for me. He felt the most grounded and real, and his subplot about being pushed out of the law practice added a welcome layer of personal stakes that went beyond the central murder mystery.

I also appreciated the dual mystery structure. Alongside the question of who killed Ben, there is Aubrey’s decade-old search for the truth about a tragedy that shattered her life. Having those two threads running in parallel gave the story more depth than a straightforward whodunit, and I was curious to see how they would intersect.

Elston’s writing is also undeniably readable. She has a knack for short chapters and cliffhanger endings that make it very easy to keep turning pages even when the story itself is testing your patience.

❎ What I didn’t Like:
And that is where things started to wobble. For a book that relies so heavily on its twists, those twists really need to land, and for me, too many of them felt like they were there for shock value rather than growing naturally out of the characters and story. By the midpoint, the reveals started to pile up in a way that felt more disorienting than thrilling. I found myself less surprised and more confused, which is not the same thing.

The character development suffered as a result. Camille and Aubrey both have compelling setups, but neither felt fully fleshed out by the end. Their motivations sometimes shifted to serve the plot rather than feeling like authentic choices these women would actually make. Relationships appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and certain character arcs just never got a satisfying resolution. I wanted to feel more connected to both of them, but the constant rug-pulling kept me at arm’s length.

There is also the issue of too many moving parts. The large cast of characters, the multiple timelines, and the various subplots meant that some threads felt underdeveloped or unnecessary. There were moments where I had to pause and remind myself who certain characters were and how they fit into the bigger picture, which pulled me out of the reading experience. I think the story would have benefited from a bit of pruning to let its strongest elements breathe.

Finally, the resolution, while clever in concept, felt a little too neat given how messy and tangled everything had become. After all those layers of deception, the ending wrapped things up in a way that didn’t quite earn the emotional payoff I was hoping for.

📚 Why You Should Read This Book:
If you love fast-paced thrillers that keep you guessing and you are the kind of reader who enjoys being thrown curveball after curveball, this book will absolutely deliver that experience. Fans of authors like Mary Kubica, Megan Miranda, and Lisa Unger will find a lot to enjoy here, especially if you loved the Southern setting and identity games of First Lie Wins. It is also a great pick if you are looking for a quick, absorbing read that you can get through in a day or two. If you tend to prioritise plot and twists over deep character work, you will probably rate this higher than I did.

💭 Final Thoughts:
Anatomy of an Alibi is a book that does a lot of things well on the surface. It is propulsive, it is cleverly constructed, and its central premise is genuinely compelling. But for me, it ultimately prioritised twists over substance, and the characters and emotional stakes got lost in the shuffle. It is not a bad read by any stretch. I was entertained, and there were moments where I was completely absorbed. But coming off the high of First Lie Wins, I expected something that would stick with me longer than this did. It is the kind of thriller that is fun in the moment but fades quickly once you close the final page. I think Elston is a talented writer with a real gift for plotting, and I will absolutely pick up whatever she writes next, but this one landed squarely in the middle for me.

Final Rating ★★★ – Twisty and fast, but the tricks outpace the heart

About the Reviewer
Minnie

📸

Book lover, chronic over-reader, and firm believer that the best stories are the ones that leave a mark. I review fiction across all genres with a soft spot for anything character-driven and emotionally complex. Want to know more? Head over to my About page to learn the full story.

This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through these links, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This helps support the blog and allows me to keep sharing book recommendations.

👀 First impressions:
I picked up The Other Passenger because I had heard so many good things about Louise Candlish, particularly after her award-winning novel Our House took the Crime and Thriller Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. She has been called the “queen of the sucker-punch twist,” and honestly, that kind of reputation is hard to ignore when you are browsing for your next thriller. The premise immediately grabbed me: Jamie Buckby commutes to work each day on the Thames river bus alongside his charismatic younger neighbour, Kit. One morning, Kit does not show up for the boat. His partner Melia reports him missing, and when Jamie steps off at his stop, the police are waiting for him. Another passenger saw the two men arguing the night before, and suddenly Jamie is the prime suspect.

It sounded like a tightly wound psychological thriller with plenty of room for secrets and misdirection. I went in expecting something gripping and layered, and in some ways I got exactly that. In others, though, the book left me wanting more.

✅ What I Liked:
The setting of this book is genuinely one of its strongest assets. Using the Thames river bus as the backdrop for a thriller felt fresh and atmospheric. There is something inherently cinematic about a daily commute by water, and Candlish uses it beautifully to create a sense of routine that slowly curdles into something unsettling. The London setting is richly drawn, and you really feel embedded in the world of these characters and their south-east London neighbourhood.

Candlish also does a fantastic job exploring themes of class, wealth, and the quiet resentments that simmer beneath the surface of friendships. Jamie works in a coffee shop for minimal pay but lives in a gorgeous home that belongs to his partner Clare’s family. Kit and Melia, twenty years younger, are struggling financially while projecting an effortlessly glamorous image. The tension between these two couples, built on envy and assumption and unspoken judgements, feels incredibly real. I found myself drawn into their dynamic almost immediately, and I think this social commentary is where Candlish truly excels.

The twists are also genuinely surprising. Just when I thought I had worked out where the story was heading, Candlish pulled the rug out from under me. There are layers to the plot that keep unfolding, and I have to give her credit for constructing a narrative that consistently wrongfooted me. The final act, in particular, delivered some reveals that I genuinely did not see coming.

❎ What I didn’t Like:
Here is where things get a bit mixed for me. The pacing is uneven throughout the book. The first half moves quite slowly as it builds the backstory of these two couples, and while I appreciated the character work, there were stretches where I felt the story was treading water. I found myself checking how many pages were left and wondering when things were going to pick up.

The characters are also, to put it gently, a deeply unlikeable bunch. Now, I do not need to like characters to enjoy a book, but I do need to feel something for them. By the midpoint, my investment in what happened to any of them had started to fade. Jamie is frustrating in his passivity and poor decisions. Kit is brash and self-destructive. Clare and Melia both feel somewhat underserved by the narrative despite being interesting on paper. The result is that some of the later twists, which should have landed with real emotional weight, fell a bit flat because I simply did not care enough about the people involved.

I also felt the ending dragged on longer than it needed to. After the major reveals, there is a significant stretch of wrapping up that could have been trimmed considerably. Several reviewers have noted the same thing, and I have to agree. The story felt like it reached its natural conclusion and then kept going for another fifty pages or so.

📚 Why You Should Read This Book:
If you enjoy domestic thrillers with an emphasis on social dynamics and class tension, this is absolutely worth your time. Fans of Lisa Jewell and B.A. Paris will find a lot to appreciate here, especially if you enjoy stories where seemingly ordinary relationships hide dark undercurrents. It is also a great pick if you love a London setting and want something that feels grounded in a very specific, very real world. If you are someone who reads for the twists and enjoys trying to stay one step ahead of the author, Candlish will keep you guessing. Just be prepared for a slow build in the first half before the momentum really kicks in.

💭 Final Thoughts:
The Other Passenger is a competent and occasionally brilliant psychological thriller that suffers from pacing issues and a cast of characters who are difficult to root for. The setting is wonderful, the social commentary is sharp, and the twists are cleverly constructed. But the slow start and the drawn-out ending diluted some of my overall enjoyment. I can see why this book has divided readers. There is a lot of skill on display here, and when the story hits its stride it really does fly. It just took too long to get there for me, and by the time the big moments arrived, I had lost some of the emotional connection that would have made them truly land. It is a solid read, but not quite the knockout I was hoping for.

Final Rating ★★★ – Sharp twists, slow burn, but the spark fizzled before the finale

About the Reviewer

Minnie

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Book lover, chronic over-reader, and firm believer that the best stories are the ones that leave a mark. I review fiction across all genres with a soft spot for anything character-driven and emotionally complex. Want to know more? Head over to my About page to learn the full story.

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