Psychological thriller set in Snæfellsnes, ICELAND
Psychological thriller set mainly in DORSET
27th September 2023
Just Between Us by Adele Parks, psychological thriller set mainly in DORSET.
Oh, the webs some people weave. Kylie Gillingham has gone missing and there is evidence she may have had some kind of complicated ending. There is also evidence that she was kept tied up before she disappeared from the scene of her assumed captivity.
Kylie was also a bigamist. She was married to Mark and took care of the two children by his first wife, who passed away, falling down the stairs, causing a broken neck – in some quarters it of course might raise a red flag that now his second wife seems to have gone from his life too. She is also married to Daan from the Netherlands, a rich man who turned her head. Investigating – and opening the novel – is DC Clements, who certainly has her work cut out.
There is then the sub-story of Stacie, who is living outside Lyme Regis with her kindly father. She has lost all her memory due to the after effects of treatment on a brain tumour and the two people co-exist relatively easily. But flashbacks are beginning to embed in Stacie’s brain and she is feeling quite unsettled.
These two parallel stories are set against the backdrop of Covid around the Summer of 2020, which adds an extra layer of drama to the narrative.
The characters in this story first appeared in Both of You, and discovering the backstories in that novel might enrich this story, I don’t know, I haven’t read it.
Adele Parks has written more than twenty novels and she is justly very popular, because she writes very well. In this novel she has got a multitude of strands and the choreography is well worked out, there are no points when the reader might struggle to understand the trajectory. There are some interesting and surprising reveals as the story progresses. However, it sometimes lacks the lightness of touch that I have experienced in her other work, like One Last Secret set in the South of France. For example, a couple of adults are motivated to engage Mark’s sons and the manner in which that is carried out really didn’t feel plausible. The ending is a helter-skelter ride to the finish, which caused me a bit of an eye roll. This is a curiously engaging read that can nevertheless lumber around at times.
Setting isn’t particularly strong in terms of TripFiction.
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