‘The Killer Next Door’ by Alex Marwood

Published by Sphere,
19 June 2014.
ISBN: 978-0-75155069-6 (PB)

After reading this brilliant thriller, I can only offer up thanks that I no longer have to consider the option of living in a London bed-sit! 

 

23 Beulah Grove is home to an assorted company of the lost, all looking to escape from some threat, or hoping for their luck to change.  Though they don't realize it, they are all manipulated by the sinister and repellant Landlord.  Among their number dwells The Lover, a loner wanting only to be loved, and solving his problem in the most gruesome of ways, graphically laid out for the reader to absorb – and wince at.  Add a steamingly hot summer in London, terrible trouble with the drains, rats and break-ins and a ruthlessly sadistic gangster, and you have all the ingredients for a truly horrific story.  Over the top?  Perhaps a little, here and there, but that simply increases the thrill. 

 

Marwood's ability to create flawed but sympathetic characters is what made this book resonate for me.  I thought her first book, The Wicked Girls, was excellent: The Killer Next Door is even better.
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Reviewer: Susan Moody

Alex Marwood is the pseudonym of a successful journalist who has worked extensively across the British press. Alex lives in South London and is working on her next novel.

Susan Moody was born in Oxford is the principal nom de plume of Susan Elizabeth Donaldson, née Horwood, a British novelist best known for her suspense novels. Susan Moody began writing crime novels with Penny Black, the first of the seven Penny Wanawake crime novels.  She has a second series of six books featuring bridge player Cassie Swan. In all, she has published 29 novels, most of them crime and suspense. Susan spent two years as a Creative Writing Tutor in Her Majesty's Prison, Bedford. She is a past Chairman of the Crime Writers' Association, serving in all as a CWA Committee member for seven years. She is a long-standing member of the prestigious Detection Club and served for three years as the President of the International Association of Crime Writers.  In 2016 Susan Moody began a new series featuring Alex Quick. Click the title to read a review of Quick and the Dead

 http://susanmoody.co.uk