Before we met - Lucie Whitehouse

Cover blurb on a pre publication book reads "the most gripping marriage thriller since Gone Girl"

Is it just me? This is not the most promising blurb. How much narrower could it get? "the most intriguing  Indonesian marriage thriller since...." "the most exciting Chinese marriage thriller set in outer space since....."

Ok, so it's likened to Gone Girl. I think they mean the original one before the film changed the ending.

Having said all of that it's actually quite a speedy thrillery read. 

Hannah decided that she was going to have a life. Not be a wifey drudge with children. So she finished with a great boyfriend and after that continued her life with a string of boyfriends on a part time basis. When her brother tells her she's running scared it doesn't take too long before she finds the man to marry.

With a relationship that's relatively new it's understandable that she doesn't know everything there is to know about her new husband but finding he's not even in the country he said he would be in is pushing trust a little bit far.

So she decides to do a bit of investigating and it turns out she's someone the Met Police would want on their force.

She asks people questions and they give her truthful answers-immediately. She gets into buildings she isn't supposed to be in and hacks into computers with amazing ease.

Having all of the clues doesn't make this particular heroine accept the truth staring her in the face. Maybe she's married a liar but she suffers from the same illness a lot of us suffer from sometimes-pride.

It's a fast  paced thriller that's not the cleverest one around but works as entertainment for the bus or flight. If you like a twisty turny red herring kind of book, this is not the one.

From page 56 for Freda's Voice

"one side of the run was fairly smooth............the other half, basically it was a rock-face with a bit of snow here and there where there was actually enough of an angle for it to stick on. Bear in mind this was the first week your husband had ever used a snowboard- we watched him come down that thing and I reckon the board must have made contact with it six times."

Freda's Voice