‘What She Did’ by Karen Cole

Published by Quercus,
18 July 2024.
ISBN: 978-1-5294-1-599-5 (PB)

A single mother with two teenage children, a demanding job and a waste of space for an ex-husband gets a late-night phone call from her distraught son. She goes to his rescue and finds him panicking over the dead body of his former girlfriend. He swears he found her like that and was in no way to blame. She’s forced to weigh up the potential outcome of calling the police – and instead she agrees to help him hide the body. As long as they both say nothing and hold their nerve, they can get away with it.

This all happens in the first thirty pages of this tense, fast-paced psychological thriller. The remaining 300-plus pages are the consequences. Because there are always consequences.  

An additional complication is that the family, Mother Emma, son Jack and daughter Molly, are ex-pats living in Cyprus. Emma’s ex is Greek Cypriot, and also lives on the island with his glamorous and slightly irresponsible new partner. Emma is a teacher of English at a private school, and as if things weren’t tortuous enough already, she’s having an affair with the dead girl’s father, also a teacher at the school. 

Emma and Jack agree that the best way forward is to find out who really did kill Zoe, the dead girl, but Jack isn’t much use in that regard. And as she desperately tried to balance everyday life, a demanding boss and doing everything she can to protect her son, complication piles on top of complication, and Emma’s life slowly falls apart.

The narrative relies heavily on the characters, their qualities and reactions and the interplay between them, to drive it forward; fortunately, this is Karen Cole’s great strength. Jack and Molly are self-absorbed in a normal, teenage way. Of the young people Emma teaches, some are directly involved, others hover in the background; all are distinct characters, different from each other. Her lover Ethan is all at sea, made so by his daughter’s apparent disappearance, and clings to any available life-raft including Emma herself. Her boss Helen tries to appear supportive and helpful but there’s a snide undertone which reveals her true agenda.

The big question, of course, is what really did happen to Zoe – and when the answer comes it’s a shock and a surprise, but the clues were there all along.

Karen Cole is clearly a force to be reckoned with in the crime fiction world. She writes about ordinary, real-sounding people in extraordinary circumstances, and their confusions and reactions come to vivid life. This is her sixth novel and can only garner new fans for her. 
------
Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Karen Cole grew up in the Cotswolds and got a degree in psychology at Newcastle University. She spent several years teaching English around the world before settling in Cyprus with her husband and two sons, where she works at a British army base as a primary school teacher. She completed the Curtis Brown writing course where she found her love of writing psychological thrillers.

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives in Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.