The Killer Next Door

by Alex Marwood

published by Penguin Books

2014

I received an advance review copy of this book from the publisher through Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.

My Review

I haven’t yet read this author’s The Wicked Girls, but had heard very good things about it, so I was excited to receive and ARC of her new work The Killer Next Door.  I am usually a little creeped out by serial killers- maybe it is due to overexposure to James Patterson and Patricia Cornwell in my formative years?  When I began this book, I felt it was going to be a drag, but by the second chapter I was totally hooked.  Marwood gives an array of interesting and well written characters, Cher, Collet, Vesta, Hossein and Thomas.  All from very different walks of life, they find themselves neighbors living in small rooms in a suburb of London.  The author takes us back and forth between these characters and the killer living in the building with them.  The parts with the killer, called the Lover, actually made my skin crawl-but in a good way!  Marwood has given us an amazing story- wonderful, rich characters wrapped in a mystery.  Read this book!  You will not want to put it down.

Summary

Alex Marwood’s debut novel, The Wicked Girls, earned her lavish praise from the likes of Stephen King, Laura Lippman, and Erin Kelly, and was shortlisted for an Edgar Award. Now Marwood’s back with a brilliant, tightly paced thriller that will keep you up at night and make you ask yourself: just how well do you know your neighbors?
Everyone who lives at 23 Beulah Grove has a secret. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be renting rooms in a dodgy old building for cash—no credit check, no lease. It’s the kind of place you end up when you you’ve run out of other options. The six residents mostly keep to themselves, but one unbearably hot summer night, a terrible accident pushes them into an uneasy alliance. What they don’t know is that one of them is a killer. He’s already chosen his next victim, and he’ll do anything to protect his secret. (from Goodreads).