"Before We Met" by Lucie Whitehouse

There has been rather a glut of thrillers with unreliable narrators recently. I guess it’s been a bit of a publishing trend. However, I found “Before we met” to be superior to many that I have read, both in structure, tone and tension. I think that this is down to Lucie Whitehouse’s skill as a writer in creating believable characters with consistent voices throughout which draw the reader into the story. I found myself unable to resist the immersion, but for me it really worked.

The premise of the novel appears to be straightforward at the outset. Having reached her mid-life without a significant other Hannah Reilly appears to have finally met the man of her dreams, in upstate New York of all places. Mark is rich, successful and single, and after a whirlwind romance they marry and relocate back to the UK where Mark’s business is based. However when Mark unexpectedly fails to return home from a business trip back to New York Hannah slowly begins to discover that all is not as it might appear on the surface. She begins to question everything that she thought she knew about her new husband, and discovers that the truth is not quite as easy to navigate or explain.

The plot is beautifully judged, without veering into ridiculous or ill-conceived set-ups. I found the novel to be a bit of a slow burner at the start. There is a lot of back story to get through (not all of which can be relied upon) and many of the early chapters explore this aspect of the story. However as a reader I found that once you get past this initial hurdle you find yourself drawn into a labyrinth of riddles and lies from which there seems to be no easy escape.

This is the first of Whitehouse’s novels that I have read, but on the strength of this I’m tempted to try her debut, The House at Midnight. In the interim I would have no hesitation in recommending this well-constructed thriller.