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Today I’m pleased to be sharing my review of The Suspects as part of the blog tour. It’s written with thanks to Rachel Gilbey at Rachel’s Random Resources for inviting me on the tour and for my copy of the book.

Blurb:

Shallow Grave meets The Secret History in this quirky psychological thriller.

When you’re bound together by secrets and lies who do you trust?

Bristol, 1988.

Five young graduates on the threshold of their careers buy a house together in order to get a foot on the property ladder before prices spiral out of their reach. Bu t it soon becomes the house share from hell.

After their New Year’s Eve party, they discover a body – and it’s clear they’ll be the first suspects. As each of them has a good reason from their past not to trust the police, they come up with a solution – one which forces them into a life of secrets and lies.

But can they trust each other?

Review:

One sure fire way to pique the reader’s interest at the beginning of a book is to start with a funeral, which incidentally is how The Suspects opens. It raises so many questions that I was hooked until the very end.

Johnson sets the scene perfectly. The house in which the five graduates live is already tainted by the death of a young woman who lived there previously, and each character has a contrasting personality which provides lots of tension, even before the plot has developed properly. The social and economic issues of the 1980s are also prevalent in the novel and this gives it a real sense of time and place and I could easily connect with the themes..

In Suspects, we are introduced to five very different characters  The dynamic between them is fascinating. They,are all very well developed and I can tell that the author lived and breathed them as she was writing  Their back stories are incredibly intriguing and I could never be quite sure who was trustworthy so I was kept on my toes the whole way through.

As the novel progresses, it becomes more and more tense. There are several twists and turns before we reach the end and I enjoyed every one.

The Suspects is available from Amazon.

You can follow the rest of the blog tour here. .