May Fiction

Adele Parks returns with another blood-curdling thriller about the mysterious disappearances of two women

- James Walton

Both of You by Adele Parks (HQ, £14.99)

ONE THING YOU can say with confidence about Both of You is that it’ll be a bestseller. After all, ever since Adele Parks expanded the dark edge of her earlier romances into full-on domestic noir, her novels haven’t just featured on the bestseller lists, they’ve topped them.

Given that it opens with a woman called Leigh tied to a radiator in an empty room, it’s clear that her new one will be pretty dark too—although not in the way you might expect. As Leigh fills us in on her pre-kidnap life, it seems for a while that we’re in for Rebecca-like tale, with Leigh worrying that she doesn’t match up to her husband Mark’s late first wife. In fact, the book proves far stranger than that.

It’s also, as we literary critics say, a bugger to review—since most of the action hinges on an unrevealable twist a third of the way through. What I can tell you is that Mark reports Leigh’s disappearance to the police, and that it’s soon followed by the mysterious vanishing of another wife, Kai, who also fills us in on her marriage.