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We switch time quite easily, from when the girls were young to the modern day. In the past, Heather is narrating and in the present it's Edie who's talking. This put such an interesting spin on it, because as a reader I will usually side with the main character unless explicitly told otherwise, and here we had sweet, innocent young Heather and slightly less well behaved Edie when they were teens, but all these years later it's nice, normal Edie and now Heather is the loose cannon. It added a brilliant element of uncertainty; it couldn't be the case that both scenarios were right because it was so improbable, so just which one of them is seeing the world clearly?
If you whack the words “psychological thriller” ''psychological thriller'' on a book, you'll find I'm inexplicably drawn to it. Occasionally such books will let me down, but not this one! The story builds beautifully, twisting and turning as secrets from the past crash down around revelations from the present. In the end I did find myself beginning to side more with one of the girls, but it was only a temporary state as the story unfolds right until the very last page, leaving you open-mouthed and doubting everything you've just been told to be true.
Set in a part of London I know well (I regularly frequent the site where the featured maternity unit is located) this is a gritty story about life in the capital when you're not on the coveted “London weighting”''London weighting'', i.e. a salary to keep up with the costs of life there. Things haven't gone especially well for either girl, and their comfortable enough home lives as children are now a thing of the past. And I'm pretty sure the last thing you want when life is already on the tough side is a long lost school friend back in your life, no matter how pleasant and helpful they seem.
I enjoyed every page of this book and have been recommending it widely since I finished it. It's not so much scary as it is creepy, and it had me on the edge of my seat for the 2 short days it took me to finish.
