Domestic psychological thrillers are obviously nothing new, but with the seemingly simultaneous launch of Gone Girl and social media - and using social media as the new word-of-mouth - the authors of these novels have started to become even more well-known than King, Grisham, and Patterson. A common theme throughout Breanne's Bookshelf is, in fact, Instagram-popular authors, so that is how I came to read The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena and how, even though I was grossly disappointed and unimpressed by the book, I learn about every subsequent novel she has published since. I'm too wary to purchase one at full-price, but when I came across A Stranger in the House at a book sale and read the synopsis, I felt it was worth a shot, and - praise the book gods - it was.
In what is quickly becoming cliche, Karen is your typical housewife (though that seems pretty indefinable these days), without so much as a parking ticket to her name. As she prepares dinner one night for her and her husband of just two years, the phone rings. It's a call she always expected to get but hoped never would, and in a flash, she's left the house, leaving behind her phone and purse, and without locking the door. The next thing she knows, Karen is in the hospital after slamming her car into a telephone pole in a rough New York neighborhood that she's never been to before. To add suspicion to injury, Karen can't remember what she was doing there in the first place, what happened before the accident, and why.
The story is mysterious enough to capture my interest throughout the first half of the book, but after that, the shocking twist - the Big Reveal - is mostly that I've abruptly turned to reading for the last page, as that is the next most interesting thing to happen. Up until the very last chapter, the story and characters don't extend beyond what we're so used to in pretty much all domestic psychological thrillers these days.
A Stranger in the House is written well enough, it's a quick read that will provide you a moment of fictitious escape, or - like it did for me - make you want to (re)watch Desperate Housewives. Does anyone else just *love* Brigid?! 🤩 And even though I did enjoy - and am surprised by - the twist that comes in the last chapter, it also left me a little disappointed and gypped; what an underdeveloped character Karen turns out to be! I came to realize, as I closed the book, that she could have been a lot more dynamic, dimensional, and interesting, which is why I gave it ⭐⭐⭐/5 on goodreads.
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