The other book being reviewed is very different in its genre and appeal: no endearing canine warms the pages of this dark thriller. Indeed, the very cover of Lucy Whitehouse’s Keep You Close has a burning matchstick that might as well be a metaphor for the reading experience on offer: incandescent, thrilling, terrifying. Those readers who liked Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl will definitely enjoy this well-crafted whodunit. Marianne Glass, an artist, falls to her death from the upstairs window of the family home in Oxford, in what is assumed to be a tragic accident. Her estranged friend, Rowan Winter, is not convinced, though, knowing very well that Marianne has always had acute vertigo, and would never have gone so close to the roof’s edge. Rowan returns to the Glass family home in Fyfield Road for the first time in a decade to seek answers to disturbing questions about Marianne’s enigmatic life over the past years: her meteoric rise on London’s art scene, her romance with her gallerist, her friendship with a fellow artist, even Marianne’s latest work.
November 2016, volume 40, No 11