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A Stranger in the House: From the author of THE COUPLE NEXT DOOR

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S From your review (Which is awesome) it seems to me it will be a 3-star read for me at best, but I’ll give it a chance.

Admittedly there is an unexpected twist in the tail as the novel draws to a close but sadly this comes too late to salvage anything more than a mediocre domestic drama. Best-selling author Mark Manson brings his signature no-nonsense wisdom back to the subject he started his career covering: relationships. The last sentence was, no doubt, intended to leave the reader feeling a slight shiver down the spine, but honestly, I thought it was wickedly funny. I was constantly torn between my desire to savor every word and my compulsion to unravel the mystery as quickly as possible. However, it didn’t help that there were too few characters and I could not get used to the author’s writing style.We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006). But with the discovery of a murdered man just blocks from the scene, bells start to sound for detectives Rasbach and Jennings, setting in motion an investigation that quickly threatens to expose some unsavory secrets beneath the cozy suburban life Karen and her husband of two years, Tom, have constructed for themselves—not to mention the downright creepy activities of the couple’s intrusive neighbor, Brigid, who’s Karen’s putative best friend. Tom opens the door to the refrigerator and stands there for a minute, staring sightlessly at its contents, then grabs an imported beer and decides to start the pasta. When Karen wakes up in hospital following the crash, she has no memory of the accident or the whole evening prior to the crash. The minute she walked in the door and saw all the colorful skeins of yarn bundled along the walls, almost up to the ceiling, she felt her spirits lift.

The movie moves at just the right pace, the interweaving of the characters' motives and behaviors is artfully executed and the musicality of the picture's dynamics is professionally effected. Tom continues to suck throughout the remainder of the book with such philosophical gems as: “he loves her, that hasn’t changed. I have only just found Shari Lapena and in the last couple of months l have read 5 of her books and just started the 6th one. Shari Lapena is the internationally bestselling author of the thrillers The Couple Next Door, A Stranger in the House, An Unwanted Guest, Someone We Know, The End of Her, Not a Happy Family and Everyone Here is Lying which have all been Sunday Times and New York Times bestsellers. While some shake their fists at the heavens when authors employ this tactic, I feel quite the opposite.In Stranger in the House, Julie Summers tells the women's story, interviewing over a hundred women who were on the receiving end of demobilisation: the mothers, wives, sisters, who had to deal with an injured, emotionally-damaged relative; those who assumed their fiancés had died only to find them reappearing after they had married another; women who had illegitimate children following a wartime affair as well as those whose steadfast optimism was rewarded with a delightful reunion. She further recounted that when she asked who he was, the man replied that he was an old friend of Karen from another life. The movie has almost everything lacking in the vast majority of thrillers turned out these days (going back decades), and is far more artfully assembled -editing, direction, acting, pacing, modulated but effective suspense, and narrative leanness, not a trace of fat- than almost everything that's come out since the turn of the millennium.

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