A Tidy Ending: The latest dark comedy from the Sunday Times bestselling author

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Cannon’s version of suburbia is wonderfully creepy and claustrophobic – a curtain-twitching, darkly funny tale with a gloriously sinister twist. Linda is still tugging at my heartstrings a little, days after finishing. The Coffin Club I don't like books where the characters have "obvious" eg dementia/autism etc. It drives me nuts (autistic myself). Was Linda supposed to have autism? Or was she just a bit odd?! Ugh. Why was Terry writing notes to her all the time? She didn’t reply. Sometimes, they don’t. Sometimes, it’s as though you haven’t spoken at all, as if your world and their world are running quite happily side by side, but there isn’t any way of moving between one and the other. All the creepy, sinister stars in the sky! 🌟”From the bestselling author of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep and Three Things About Elsie, a delightfully sinister novel about a married woman living a nice, quiet suburban life—but things aren’t always what they seem…”

MY THOUGHTS: Very clever, Joanna Cannon. I had absolutely no idea where you were taking me, not the slightest suspicion. My jaw hit the floor at the end and I laughed, probably a tad hysterically. It was just so beautifully unexpected. Ridiculously good—gripping and creepy and clever and insightful. An absolute masterclass in characterization—Linda is going to stay with me for a very long time. Just as she did with The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, Cannon perfectly captures the claustrophobia of suburban life while reminding us how little we really know the people who live behind those lace curtains and neat hedges.” — Marianne Cronin, author of The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot I have read and loved everything Joanna Cannon has written, and she has surprised me again with this entertaining, character driven mystery that has dark undertones.I really enjoyed this book, the writing is superb (see notes for some examples), and the author’s way with words captured me (Joanna Cannon - get OUT of my head!). Yeah I'm confused with the whole name change thing from Karen to Rebecca. I also don't understand how Jolyon fits in. At the end it seemed as if he was in kahoots with Linda.

Jo's writing is as delicate and precise as tapestry and Linda is a character you'll never forget." - Jill Mansell Linda is an interesting character. Initially she may not appear so but there is more going on under that tatty blue quilted house coat than it appears. Her husband, Terry, is an irritant. He is messy, uncaring and leaves her notes telling her what to do. She has no friends, and her mother is all show but no real use. She was always much closer to her father, and she misses that. She has an ingrained distrust of the police after they did what they did to him. As catalogues arrive at Linda and Terry’s house for the previous tenant Rebecca, Linda starts to open them and is transfixed. They promise a world filled with glamour and sophistication, and Linda starts to wonder if she tried to be more like the person Rebecca clearly is, whether she would have a chance to finally be seen at last. Linda relates her story from within some sort of care facility, six weeks after everything happened, but it’s soon apparent that she’s an unreliable narrator. She presents as naïve, a bit simple, and is used to people underestimating her, doesn’t mind that, in fact. Those who are aware of her history might put it down to a traumatic childhood experience… Delicious . . . thoroughly engrossing. . . . This book didn't just stay with me. It stayed and stayed and stayed.” — Laurie Hertzel, Minneapolis Star TribuneI have loved the other two books I have read by this author, and so came to this one with high expectations. But this one took me a couple of tries to get into. I never gelled with Linda. Maybe it was because she seemed a bit similar to the autistic main character of another book which I loved but this was not as well done? Maybe it was just Linda being awkward? Maybe because the longer it went on the more far fetched the story became? Or maybe it was the high expectations going into it? For whatever reason I found it hard to maintain interest at times. None of the characters were likeable and while some of Linda’s thought processes were amusing, the story dragged. Compare Linda’s relationship with Rebecca to Rebecca’s relationship with Linda. How do they treat each other? Take advantage of each other? Why? In Will Dean’s First Born, we meet Molly, an identical twin whose sister, Katie, has just been murdered in New York. Molly has always been the less adventurous of the two, cautious and frightened of life, but she forces herself to leave London to try to find out what really happened to her twin. As the New York police investigation seems to stall, Molly turns detective, leaving her comfort zone to interrogate Katie’s teachers, friends and boyfriends in her quest for the truth. An identical twin mystery is always entertaining and Dean, author of the excellent Tuva Moodyson series of Sweden-set thrillers and the standalone The Last Thing to Burn, handles his plot with skill. Molly, properly alone for the first time in her life, is a complex, intriguing protagonist – and Dean has plenty of surprises up his sleeve for the unwary reader.

The chapters are mostly in the past with the murders and Linda’s preoccupation, but there also “now” chapters where Linda is in the present, foreshadowing what may have happened in the past. Newspapers will always sniff around, asking their questions, wanting answers and photographs and rummaging in everyone else’s business. It’s started, even now. All those people who walked at the edges of my life over the years have begun to reappear. All those passersby and all those silent voices have suddenly found something they want to say. Everyone is trying very hard to work out who they think I am, which is odd because they were never very interested in who I was before any of this happened. I suppose they want to make sense of it all, and they’ll struggle because no one has all the pieces of the story, except for me. It won’t stop them, though. Poor Linda, they’ll say. She always was soft in the head or Poor Linda, I often thought she was a little bit strange, because we like to cast the heroes and the villains quite early on in a story, and then everyone knows where they are. She goes on about the number of reports she’s made, and we get a good picture of her as the neighbourhood busybody. Her mother is another real piece of work, a controlling woman who moved Linda to Wales after some family event in their past, something to do with her father, which is revealed only slowly. Get me out of here! I’ve already said, I was so claustrophobic inside Linda’s head! It sort of felt like I was in an MRI machine. Let me out! When Linda's mum asked where she wanted to move to, she manipulated her mum. She says that lots of people moved from her area after her dad died and hints that she overheard conversations about where the other girls were moving to. I think she heard whets Karen was going and got her mum to move to the same area. I do wonder if she killed Karen too.Joanna Cannon creates a world that is so real, so parochial and stifling… Then adds in a killer. Glorious.’ – Jane Fallon, Getting Rid of Matthew