The Couple Across the Street by Anita Waller
Genre: Domestic thriller, Domestic drama
Read: 13th June 2023
Published: 20th June 2023
★★★ 3 stars
DESCRIPTION:
A darkness settles on this supposedly quiet street...
When Clare becomes a widow, her response is something that shocks her – relief. All she wants to do is move on and figure out how to continue her life, alone, no matter the guilt that brings.
So when Vic, her closest friend, comes to her, showing the signs of trouble in her own marriage, she is more than supportive in helping her leave Rob.
But Vic doesn’t get the chance to do that. Because as they go over to Vic's house to collect her things, they find a body. Rob’s.
It appears someone else had an axe to grind. But for Clare, already reeling from secrets from her own late husband’s dark past, she’s about to find out this murder isn’t as straightforward as it may appear…
MY THOUGHTS:
Who knows what goes on behind closed doors...?
This is only the second book I've read by this author and I'm stil unsure whether it's my cup of tea. I enjoyed the story but it's a kind of mixed bag. The title seems to have nothing really to do with the real story...which I'm still trying to unpick. It begins with a woman becoming a widow and learning to live without her husband to her best friend across the road leaving her own husband to the murder of said husband to the discovery of a secret child!
Clare has just buried husband John after his short battle with cancer. Her description of her husband is somewhat mixed as she attests to having loved him but then says he was a little controlling, preferring her to stay at home to care for him and his daughters. Did he not want her to have an identity or life outside of the home? I don't know. I couldn't get much of a read on him as he was not actually around to assess.
Across the street, Vic and her husband Rob have been having problems and so one day after Rob heads off to work, Vic turns up with the news that she's leaving him...culminating in a bright purple black bruise across her face. Vic has a flat all set across town that not even Clare knows where so she can't be forced to reveal her whereabouts to Rob should he come demanding answers. Which he inevitably does, knowing the two women are best friends.
Clare's daughters are preparing for new lives of their own. Sara and Greg are about to embark on a new chapter in their lives while Grace and Megan have just bought an apartment together...something they felt they couldn't do while Grace's father was still alive as he never really accepted their relationship.
Meanwhile across town a young man, Jed Grantham, has just buried his mother and is now looking for answers that only she could have provided but never did. And his search brings him into the lives of Clare and her extended family, bringing with it a shocking revelation.
Set against the backdrop of the Queen's death and her funeral, I was taken back to that time last year and remembered the emotions I felt too at having lost the only monarch I had ever known. This is the first book I have read with the Queen's death and funeral as a backdrop though it probably won't be the last. It doesn't play a huge part but it is there and serves to remind us.
I really tried to like the story but I really couldn't see the point of all the story threads in one book. It kind of made it a bit of a haphazard mess and I'm still not sure what to think of it. It felt rather disjointed and the characters were hard to connect with. And then another curve ball from ten years previous was thrown in...once that was, it was pretty easy to figure out what happened then.
I would like to thank #AnitaWaller, #Netgalley, #BoldwoodBooks and #RachelsRandomResources for an ARC of #TheCoupleAcrossTheStreet in exchange for an honest review.
MEET THE AUTHOR:
With many books to her name, she feels she has finally realised her dream, a dream offered to her in July 2015 when Bloodhound Books accepted her first novel, Beautiful. She writes mainly psychological thrillers, but was commissioned in 2018 to write a cosy mystery series, the Kat and Mouse trilogy. By March 2022 this will have grown to eight books, plus a spin-off standalone novel called Epitaph, featuring Doris, one of the characters from the series.
She is now seventy-six years of age, happily writing most days and would dearly love to plan a novel, but has accepted that isn’t the way of her mind. Every novel starts with a sentence and she waits to see where that sentence will take her, and her characters.
As of March 2022 the total number of books published by Bloodhound Books will be twenty. Anita’s personal favourite? Winterscroft, her only supernatural thriller. Her first book for Boldwood Books was published in August 2022.
In her life away from the computer in the corner of her kitchen, she is a Sheffield Wednesday supporter with blue blood in her veins!
Her genre is murder – necessary murder.
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