When Alice moves in with her partner Leo into The Circle, a gated private housing society of exclusive houses near Finsbury Park in London, she feels hopeful about their new life together. Alice and Leo have been seeing each other for twenty months, although they've been meeting only over the weekends due to their different locations.
Alice's life in The Circle is beautifully described and I really enjoyed reading about her neighbours, whom she tries to get to know. She wants to make friends and quickly identifies Eve, Maria and Tamsin as the potential candidates. Not a long time after she moves into The Circle, Alice finds out about Nina, the therapist who lived in the house before and was murdered in the house. Appalled at the discovery, Alice calls up Ben, the real estate agent who sold them the house and asks about it. Ben delicately informs her that Leo was aware of the history of the house and bought it because it was available at a lower price.
The fact that Leo kept such a huge secret from her raises doubts in Alice's mind about whether she really knows her husband. She also discovers that Oliver, Nina's husband, was the prime suspect in her murder and he committed suicide not long after. Alice begins to wonder whether Nina's murderer is still out there, one of the residents of The Circle. She begins to invite her friends and their husbands for drinks, trying to find out the facts of the murder, but most people seem to be reluctant to talk about it. The only commonality is that everyone seems to believe it was Oliver who murdered Nina after finding out that she was having an affair.
Alice soon becomes obsessed with solving the murder, especially because her sister, whom she lost in a car accident, was also called Nina. She discovers other secrets that her partner, Leo, has been keeping from her and they decide to separate. Suspicion falls on everyone including Leo, and her friends Eve, Maria and Tamsin and their respective partners. At one point, Alice's obsession with the murder becomes a bit tedious, but we do understand the reason behind her obsession at the end of the story. She desperately wants justice to be done in Nina's case because her dead sister, Nina, did not receive justice.
It's a story full of suspense and intrigue. I love the author's writing. She does a brilliant job in showing us the story (rather than telling it). The writing is simple, engaging and straightforward. I would say most of the book is a series of Alice's interactions with her neighbours and the little tidbits of information that are revealed to the main character and the reader slowly throughout the book. Towards the end, just before the big reveal, I guessed correctly who the murderer was. But I couldn't guess the whole mystery of it, which was nicely done. Overall, it's a novel that pulls you in slowly but firmly into the whole mystery of who committed the murder and what's going to happen to the protagonist. I love reading psychological thrillers and this one was a brilliant book by B A Paris, already one of my favourite authors. I enjoyed it and would rate it 5/5.
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