[amazon_link id=”0143121510″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ][/amazon_link]Title : The Other Woman’s House
Author : Sophie Hannah
Genre : Mystery
Publisher : Penguin
Pages : 438
Source : Publisher
Rating : 3.8/5

Catriona Louise Bowskill (aka Connie) and her husband Christian, or Kit, live in beautiful Melrose Cottage in Little Holling, Silsford. Late one night, when Connie can’t sleep she decides to view homes on a real estate site. In one of the virtual home tours for 11 Bentley Grove, a home that she is familiar with because of past associations, she sees a woman prone in a pool of blood. Horrified at seeing this gruesome sight on a public website, she wakes her sleeping husband. But, when he views the home tour again, there is no dead woman; the home is as normal as can be.

Connie is a nervous self-doubter, given to worry and neuroses. She’s been seeing a homeopath Alice for this, and when she confides her aggravating experience in Alice, Alice advises her to go the police. Everyone thinks that Connie is delusional, and the late night hour and her tiredness have contributed to her morbid hallucination. Connie herself is beginning to think it too.

Am I going mad? Didn’t Anton hear any of what I said, about seeing a murdered woman lying in a pool of blood, and talking to a detective this morning? Why is no one telling him to shut up? Did nobody hear me? That none of them should have anything to say on the subject seems as impossible to me as what I saw on the laptop last night – impossible, yet real, unless I’ve lost my capacity to distinguish reality from its opposite.

The book is written in the first-person, so Connie is our unreliable narrator. She has been much put upon by her family; her parents are cold and petty in their disapproval, her sister’s behavior oozes jealousy, and Connie is berated, in an underhand fashion, for being careless and uncaring. Only her husband actually seems to care for her, love her, but Connie has her suspicions about him too. She is surrounded, it seems by antagonists, and her thoughts and fears are bounced back at her with malice.

This is an interesting setup for a story, when all we have to guide us through is Connie, and she isn’t too firm with her own opinions. The author develops this as an atmospheric psychological mystery, with deep dives into Connie’s psyche, her thoughts on her family and Kit, so much of the prose is written in a “stream-of-consciousness” kind of a way . Connie’s familial relationship is minutely described, reminding me of the description of Frank Mackey’s family in Tana French’s “Faithful Place”. The book’s characters are quirky, and possibly crazy – we aren’t sure though which of them are actually insane and which of them are just victims of circumstance.

There are also sub-stories here, which didn’t add any value – there is the Simon Waterhouse-Charlie Zailer angle, where we get to hear Charlie’s thoughts on marriage and attachment, and homeopath Alice’s strange attachment to Simon. We get to hear from unassuming Sam Kombothekra as he attempts to fill Simon’s shoes for a while, and investigate Connie’s mystery. If I have a bone to pick it would be that we get to hear the innermost thoughts of too many people, to the point where it begins to overwhelm the main story. I would have wished for better control of the main thread, and for better delineation between the parts that mattered and those that did not.

Overall, I enjoyed this book; it kept me engrossed and guessing. I am a big fan of Ms. Hannah’s poetry because of how astute it is in deciphering emotion. She brings this commendable quality to this book too; her colloquial prose winds around delicately in description. There are a few places in the book where transitions are abrupt and it took me a few paragraphs to make sense of the locale and the people involved in a particular event. But overall, this book works very well as a gripping, psychological mystery; I read all of it in one sitting, staying up till the wee hours of the morning to finish it.