Brighton thriller writer Julia Crouch specialises in women behaving badly. As she publishes her fifth novel, Her Husband’s Lover, she explains to JENNY MARK-BELL why it’s good to be bad
HER HUSBAND’S LOVER is one of those books you want to hoover up in a single sitting: it is a rollicking, twist-and-turn psychological thriller that keeps the reader guessing to the very last page.
The dark tale features a protagonist who has lost her family – and the rival who is determined to ruin her life. It is Brighton writer Julia Crouch’s fifth novel since her debut, Cuckoo, was published in 2011 – a year before Gone Girl grabbed headlines for ushering in a new wave of domestic thrillers. Julia says she has always enjoyed writing “problematic women” and she has no truck with the accusations of misogyny that were thrown at Gone Girl, in particular when the film came out in 2014. “I think if you’re a woman you’re allowed to write about women behaving badly to one another. It’s actually cathartic to write women who are kind of the punks of the emotional world. They see something they want and just go out and get it. I think that’s quite an interesting thing to see in fiction because in traditional crime fiction, we’re the secretaries, seductresses or the victims.”
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