Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough
Louise is an insecure single mom who, one night, meets and kisses a dashing stranger. She’s mortified the next morning to find that the stranger, David, is now her boss. Her married boss. Then she (literally) bumps into David’s wife, Adele, and the two of them hit it off.
Despite her best friend’s warnings that all of this is a bad idea, Louise falls in deeper: into a full-blown affair with David, and into a close friendship with Adele. In particular, Louise and Adele bond over their shared experience with night terrors.
This triangle is a freight train barreling toward trouble, and Louise soon learns that the stakes might be deadlier, as questions and mysteries lurk beneath the surface of Adele and David’s lives: Who, if anyone, killed Adele’s parents? Who, if anyone, killed Adele’s teenage friend? Is David abusive? And most importantly, what’s being plotted in the here and now?
Behind Her Eyes (2017) is an unsettling psychological thriller from Sarah Pinborough with a multi-layered twist at the end. There’s a cross-genre element, too, and I’ll try to avoid spoiling it too badly, but there’s a reason I’m reviewing the book here. It’s quite effectively creepy, and introduced in a believably gradual way.
If you enjoy this type of thriller, and are OK with some genre-bending, Behind Her Eyes is well worth a read. It certainly kept me hooked!
Your review, and that cover, creeped me right out, in the I-have-to-buy-it-right-now kind of way.
Awesome! I want to say Amanda Rutter did the UK cover and that’s how I heard about it.
COrrection: I looked it up on FB and apparently no, she’s just close to the author and posted that she had seen it in a shop. Anyway I bought it because of Amanda, so I’ll blame her. ;)
Agreed! Thanks for alerting me to this one, Kelly!
So many domestic thrillers have a supernatural or psychic element. It’s not a mashup or a crossover, exactly, it’s just interesting to see those elements creep into those stories.
Yup! I did want to make sure to mention it, since I saw some other reviews where people were annoyed that the supernatural popped up. And we’ve reviewed her more overtly supernatural stuff before, so we’d have a decent excuse to review this even if it didn’t have that there, so I wanted to be clear.