Today I’m joining the blog tour for Halfway House. My review is written with thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me on the tour and to Orenda Books for my copy of the book.

Blurb:

They`re the housemates from Hell…

When her disastrous Australian love affair ends, Lou O´Dowd heads to Edinburgh for a fresh start, moving in with her cousin, and preparing for the only job she can find … working at a halfway house for very high-risk offenders.

Two killers, a celebrity paedophile and a paranoid coke dealer – all out on parole and all sharing their outwardly elegant Edinburgh townhouse with rookie night-worker Lou…

And instead of finding some meaning and purpose to her life, she finds herself trapped in a terrifying game of cat and mouse where she stands to lose everything – including her life.

Slick, darkly funny and nerve-janglingly tense, Halfway House is both a breathtaking thriller and an unapologetic reminder never to corner a desperate woman…

Review:

I’ve read a few books by Helen FitzGerald now and I think Halfway House is my favourite so far. I love her writing style, which is full of dark humour whilst she actually addresses a number of serious issues.

The protagonist of Halfway House is Lou, and she’s a brilliant first person narrator, bringing us into her life with brutal honesty and humour. Although she’s younger than me, and many of our life experiences are different, I actually found some similarities between us and this helped me to relate to her and sympathise with her throughout the novel.

I believe Helen FitzGerald has experience of working in the probation service and this shines through her prose, creating a realistic and compelling group of characters and a setting that I found really intriguing. 

In the last third of Halfway House, the story definitely and escalates and the tension increases tenfold almost in an instant. I found it very difficult to tear my eyes away from this story, and I now have no fingernails left! 

Halfway House is available from Amazon.

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