Psychological thriller set in BLACKHEATH, LONDON

28th December 2022

Tell Me No Lies by Lisa Hall, psychological thriller set in Blackheath, London.

Steph and Mark leave Crouch End behind and move to Blackheath. Here they want to regroup after Mark had an affair with a rather famous personality. They have a young son, Henry, and they have hardly arrived when Mark is summoned to work in Paraguay.

Steph is left on her own to ensure Henry acclimatises to his new school and to nurture herself, given that she is expecting their second child. Her own mother is self referring and of little help and so it turns out that Laurence, the next door neighbour, proves to be extremely supportive, as does Lila who lives opposite. Lila, in particular, becomes a good friend to Steph, yet there is a sense of intensity that starts to feel quite uncomfortable.

Steph has regular sessions with a therapist because in her teens she was badly assaulted. The perpetrator was caught and imprisoned and she was able to approach life without too much fear. When she had Henry, her psychological well-being deteriorated and she continues to this day to need professional psychological help.

Soon a selection of dead flowers start to appear on her doorstep, sometimes with accompanying notes, the tenet of which terrify her to her very core. She is clear in her own mind about what is happening but there is a building sense that others believe she is paranoid and perhaps don’t take her evidence sufficiently seriously. Is someone targeting her? Does she have the resilience to withstand the machinations of someone who wants to play mental games with her, perhaps even destroy her?

The ending is unresolved and feels like a bit of a damp squib, especially when so much effort has gone into building a good storyline thus far.

The odd thing, for me, reading this novel, was a sense that this felt rather familiar. Indeed, I then managed to recollect the novel, published in 2021, that has a very similar theme and is set in adjacent Greenwich (Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner) – there is pregnancy and the concomitant altered emotional state of the woman, absent husband, cloying friendships, and, similarly, largely set in the run up to Christmas. It’s quite a discombobulating experience because one storyline interferes with the other.

Tina for the TripFiction Team

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