Kerry Hammond reports to Mystery Playground today from the
most recent meeting of the Denver-based Crime & Beyond Book Club.
Our book club met this month to explore The Killer Next
Door, a book by new-to-us author, Alex Marwood. Marwood is a British novelist
and journalist who received wide acclaim for her previous book, psychological
thriller The Wicked Girls. She continues to receive praise for The Killer Next Door
and has since written another standalone novel of suspense, The Darkest Secret.
First, a little bit about the book. The Killer Next Door
follows the lives of a group of people thrown together by unfortunate circumstances,
in a London bedsit located at 23 Beulah Grove. Each is down on their luck in
some way, and several are hiding from someone or something that could destroy
them. One of them is a killer.
Marwood is a master of creating vivid characters that come
to life on the pages of her book and stay with the reader long after the end of
the novel. Her writing is so vivid that we felt we could smell the smells of
the characters’ deplorable living conditions. The disgusting landlord was so
real to us that we cringed at the very mention of his name.
The story was engaging, and at times wonderfully gruesome.
We were drawn into the events in the lives of these unlikely neighbors and
experienced quite a few surprises along the way. The author kept you in just
enough suspense to make it hard to put the book down and delivered an ending
that left us all extremely satisfied. A great read.
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