Samantha Downing 

A crime thriller of crime thriller writers!

Soooo… I’ve just discovered Samantha Downing. (Where has she been hiding herself away all these years? I honestly don’t know why Twitter didn’t tell me about her) And my first Downing was My Beautiful Wife, which was just brilliant. 

It’s a story told from the husband’s perspective about being in a co-dependent serial killer relationship. Cute eh? He does the sourcing and his wife does the killing and most of the action and suspense comes from their obsession (or hobby) depending how you look at it and how this fits in with family life, (they have two teenage kids) and their careers. This idea in itself is a lot of fun to play with. As so many people have said, it’s got the Dexter vibe to it and Downing does a really good job of drip feeding the motivation into the present drama via backstory flashbacks which screams out for a movie version.

But of course, this is just the set up. Where most books conclude, this book begins and I think that’s what makes it so interesting. It’s not just Dexter meets Mr and Mrs Smith, it’s what do you do when your twisted fantasies and lifestyle start having a negative effect on your kids? When you start something, how are you going to end it? That’s the real gem of the book. But then there’s more.

This book is unique in many ways, the reason being, Downing has picked a very tricky story to tell that most commercial writers would give up trying to shape in favour of something more straight-forward.

How to make the first chapter interesting and hooky without giving anything away?

Check!

How to explain motivation while also moving the story forward.

Check.  

In short, it was a great read and I’m proud to say I paid for it myself and you can get it at Waterstones.