Book Bangs: Review 📖 Our House by Louise Candlish

Our House by Louise Candlish
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hailed as “A Thriller” with an “OMG ending” Our House, a new release by Louise Candlish will not disappoint fans of her work. A broken marriage between Fiona and Bram Lawson sets in motion a series of events that will disrupt their lives in the most intrusive of ways. This mystery smolders through the dysfunctional relationship between a husband and wife of many years, their lives and long term friendships in a prestigious community, and their determination to put their children first in their divorce proceedings. The house heist plot is unique, playing out slowly but deliberately, and spawning several horrific twister events with each chapter, until the final “no that didn’t just happen” scene.

On a bright January morning in the London suburbs, a family moves into the house they’ve just bought in Trinity Avenue.

Nothing strange about that. Except it is your house. And you didn’t sell it.

When Fiona Lawson comes home to find strangers moving into her house, she's sure there's been a mistake. She and her estranged husband, Bram, have a modern co-parenting arrangement: bird's nest custody, where each parent spends a few nights a week with their two sons at the prized family home to maintain stability for their children. But the system built to protect their family ends up putting them in terrible jeopardy. In a domino effect of crimes and misdemeanors, the nest comes tumbling down.

Now Bram has disappeared and so have Fiona's children. As events spiral well beyond her control, Fiona will discover just how many lies her husband was weaving and how little they truly knew each other. But Bram's not the only one with things to hide, and some secrets are best kept to oneself, safe as houses.

"I'm telling you-you must have made a mistake. I'm telling you it's not possible for you to have bought a house that was never for sale."

"But it was for sale-of course it was. Otherwise, we could never have bought it."

Fi stares at Lucy, utterly disoriented. What she is saying, what she is doing, is complete lunacy and yet she doesn't look like a madwoman. No, Lucy looks like a woman convinced that the person she is talking to is the deranged one.

"Maybe you ought to phone your husband," Lucy says finally.

Geneva, 1:30 p.m.

He lies on the bed in his hotel room, arms and legs twitching. The mattress is a good one, designed to absorb sleeplessness, passion, deepest nightmare, but it fails to ease agitation like his. Not even the two antidepressants he's taken have subdued him.

Perhaps it's the planes making him crazy, the pitiless way they grind in and out, one after another, groaning under their own weight. More likely it's the terror of what he's done, the dawning understanding of all that he's sacrificed.

Because it's real now. The Swiss clock has struck. One thirty here, twelve thirty in London. He is now in body what he has been in his mind for weeks: a fugitive, a man cast adrift by his own hand. He realizes that he's been hoping there'll be, in some bleak way, relief, but now the time has come there is something bleaker: none. Only the same sickening brew of emotions he's felt since leaving the house early this morning, somehow both grimly fatalistic and wired for survival.

Oh, God. Oh, Fi. Does she know yet? Someone will have seen, surely? Someone will have phoned her with the news. She might even be on her way to the house already.

He shuffles upright, his back against the headboard, and tries to find a focus in the room. The armchair is red leatherette, the desk black veneer. A return to a 1980s aesthetic, more unsettling than it has any right to be. He swings his legs over the side of the bed. The flooring is warm on bare feet-vinyl or something else man-made. Fi would know what the material is; she has a passion for interiors.

The thought causes a spasm of pain, a new breathlessness. He rises, seeking air-the room, on the fifth floor, is ablaze with central heating-but behind the complicated curtain arrangement the windows are sealed. Cars, white and black and silver, streak along the carriageways between hotel and airport, and, beyond, the mountains divide and shelter, their white peaks tinged peppermint blue. Trapped, he turns once more to face the room, thinking, unexpectedly, of his father. His fingers reach for the red leatherette chair, grip the seat back. He does not remember the name of this hotel, which he chose for its nearness to the airport, but knows that it is as soulless a place as he deserves.

Because he's sold his soul, that's what he's done. He's sold his soul.

But not so long ago that he's forgotten how it feels to have one.

Louise Candlish studied English at University College London and worked as an editor and copywriter before writing fiction. OUR HOUSE is published in the US by Berkley in August 2018 and is out now in the UK, published by Simon & Schuster.

Louise is the bestselling author of eleven previous novels, including THE SWIMMING POOL and THE SUDDEN DEPARTURE OF THE FRASERS (Penguin, 2015), which has been optioned for TV by Hartswood Films.

Louise lives in South London with her husband and daughter.

Follow her day to day on Twitter at @louise_candlish or get updates at www.louisecandlish.com