Cross Her Heart: A gripping thriller from the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author of Behind Her Eyes, now a Netflix sensation!

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Angela’s fingers fly over the keypad of her phone, and I know mine will buzz in a minute once she’s sent out the message to our MyBitches WhatsApp group. Soon, however, they will discover that someone else in their lives has a secret much darker than any they carry. After a brief, ominous section set in an unde­fined “After,” the Cross Her Heart moves to “Now,” which is broken up among a number of alternating first-person, present-tense narrators.

Still mainly reading SF/F and not even getting close to bored of it – just really craving thrillers that past year or so.

One thick black eyebrow, filled in with pencil, wriggles like a slug on her olive face as she tries to raise it suggestively. Pinborough weaves several different time periods and several different narrative voices to create layers of character and conflict, but the characters are types often found in psychological thrillers, and while their problems are often relatable, at least at first, they aren’t particularly engaging. Lisa lives for her daughter Ava, her job, and her best friend Marilyn, but when a handsome client shows an interest in her, Lisa starts daydreaming about sharing her life with him too. I’ve worked here for over ten years and I don’t think we’ve ever socialized personally, only the two of us.

Ava’s words are quickly echoed by the others and then they’re tumbling into Jodie’s car, the tiny blond girl at the wheel, and I’m left behind at our open gate. Erin named Bree to be their guardian, but Luke and Kayla’s biological father, sneaky and dishonest Craig, suddenly wanted custody.

If you fancy a twisted psychological thriller where the stakes are higher than expected then pick this one up – I think the ending will surprise you. It’s something that is entirely mine and it’s making Courtney and all his cool seem like teenage-boy bullshit. I also felt terribly sorry for her daughter because not only does she have an incredibly protective mom but she has a mom who is relatively clueless as to what her daughter is actually doing. It’s breathless stuff, made more so by Pinbor­ough’s refusal to make Lisa either hopelessly hapless or overpoweringly capable. Me and Ange are the only ones at King Edward’s Grammar, Lizzie is in sixth form at Harris Academy, Arse Academy as it’s known, the shithole school in the middle of town, and Jodie is a first year at Allerton Uni.

The main character of this story must also confront signs of danger in and around her own home and decide whether her friend is the person she claims to be. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M. This identity also had to be abandoned, however, when she revealed her true identity to the man with whom she had had her daughter and he became dangerously unstable, erratic, drinking too much and behaving in a threatening manner. When mythologies fail me, I like to compare Leigh's writing to a fine bourbon, smooth, mellow but with a definite bite.They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites. I knew going in that this new thriller lacked the sort of genre-bending twist that sold me on Behind Her Eyes, but even with that expectation I was disappointed by this run-of-the-mill thriller.