‘The Stranger Inside’ by Amanda Cassidy.

Published by Canelo,
7 August 2025.
ISBN: 978-1-83598287-7 (PB)

Amanda Cassidy’s fourth novel features fast-paced action and a gripping plot. It is a book ideal for readers fond of compulsive page-turners, although some of its twists and turns might strain credibility. But what’s important is The Stranger Inside is an enjoyable and rollicking ride of a story.

The novel begins with a scenario frighteningly familiar to any parent. One wet and windy night, Ciara Duffy, a midwife in Dublin, goes to buy pizza, leaving her nine-year-old daughter Sally and her friend Evie watching television. With her husband Morgan away on business in England, Ciara is anxious about having left the girls on their own, however briefly. Worry turns to panic when she sees an unknown figure in her kitchen on a phone ap. 

Rushing home, Ciara finds everything as she left it apart from a smashed plant pot in the upstairs bathroom. As the girls claim not to have heard the pot break or to have seen anyone in the house, she blames wind gusting through a slightly open window. But Ciara’s relief is only temporary. Rising in the night to use the toilet, she returns to bed to find her husband’s bloody body, stabbed through the heart with the kitchen knife she’d carried as a weapon earlier, in searching the house for the intruder she’d glimpsed on her phone.

The police arrive and soon settle on Ciara as their main suspect. Their questioning has revealed the parlous condition of Ciara’s and Morgan’s finances and the dubious state of their marriage. Ciara’s father, Jimmy Mooney, the former detective chief superintendent of the local police station, promises to save the daughter he dotes on himself, but is soon found dead, shot in the stomach in his car. Although Ciara is convicted, she proves she possesses her tough, resourceful father’s mettle by managing to escape from prison. On the run, she then faces down one danger after another in her desperate efforts to see her daughter, who has fallen sick in her absence, and to solve her husband’s murder.

Mysteries abound. There is a bald man intent on pursuing Ciara. Ciara’s devotion to and protectiveness of her daughter seems excessive, verging on obsessiveness. It becomes apparent Ciara harbors a deep, dark secret about Sally, Morgan is revealed to have been having an affair with Evie’s mother, and Ciara can’t help wondering if it’s coincidental that her father was killed while investigating her husband’s death. These disparate strands of the story are satisfactorily gathered together and explained at the end of the story. Recommended for those who like a good read delivered in fluent prose and enjoy engaging characters and a convoluted plot.
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Reviewer: Wendy Jones Nakanishi/aka Lea O’Harra.

Amanda Cassidy is a freelance journalist, commissioning editor, former Sky News reporter and author. She has been shortlisted for the Irish Journalist of the Year Awards, the Headline Media writing awards and more recently the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger for her debut, Breaking.  

Lea O’Harra.  An American by birth, did her postgraduate work in Britain – an MA in Lancaster and a doctorate at Edinburgh – and worked full-time for 36 years at a Japanese university. Since retiring in March 2020, she has spent part of each year in Lancaster and part in Takamatsu on Shikoku Island, her second home, with occasional visits to the States to see family and friends. An avid reader of crime fiction since childhood, as a university professor she wrote academic articles on it as a literary genre and then decided to try her hand at composing such stories herself, publishing the so-called ‘Inspector Inoue mystery series’ comprising three murder mysteries set in rural, contemporary Japan. She has also published two standalone crime fiction novels.