Just What Kind Of Mother Are You? by Paula Daly

What's your worst nightmare? Lisa Kallisto is living one of hers.

Lisa tries hard. Very, very hard. Running her family and staying on top of her job is hard work,  though , and leaves her permanently frazzled. Her best friend Kate, however, seems to have it all. She lives in a beautiful house with an attentive husband and is the kind of mother Lisa dreams of being. Kate manages everything perfectly, from washing to school fêtes; she's the centre of her children's world.

Which only makes Lisa feel even more wretched when Kate's daughter Lucinda goes missing. Lucinda is supposed to be staying with Lisa's daughter, Sally,  after school. But Sally doesn't go to school that day and Lisa, permanently frazzled as she is, simply forgets that Lucinda is supposed to be at her house. So when Lucinda doesn't arrive at school the next day, she's already been missing for hours. To make matters even worse, another local girl recently went missing and turned up traumatised and half naked. 

Lisa determines that she will save Lucinda. But it's not easy. Her family and Kate's family come under extreme pressure and threaten to burst apart at the seams.

This pacy thriller stems from this simple but brilliant question: what if it was your fault that your best friend's child was abducted? How could you live with the guilt? Anyone reading the opening chapters, parent or not, will feel their stomach lurch with Lisa's as her nightmare unfolds.

Daly also explores modern families and the desperate striving for a Cath-Kidston esque domestic perfection that drives many women to run themselves ragged. In the compelling opening chapter,  Lisa complains about feeling overwhelmed,  but realises that her life looks perfect from the outside.  And as the story develops she finds out a lot more about what it takes to keep Kate's supposedly perfect life on track. Daly is good, too, on the jealousy lurking in friendships. Lisa can't help but envy Kate's lifestyle and Kate herself.

I finished this book in a day and would have finished it even more quickly if I hadn't had  to go to work! It's pacy and twisty, with a real shock at the end. Thriller fans will love it, and so will fans of psychological crime fiction written by the likes of Sophie Hannah or Nicci French. A very promising debut indeed.

I must thank Alison Barrow at Transworld, who kindly provided me with a review copy. Just What Kind Of Mother Are You will be published in April 2013.

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Kiss Me First by Lottie Moggach

How do you know who you're talking to online? Who lurks behind that desktop,  laptop, tablet or phone screen? When you tweet, or update your status on Facebook,  or even write a blog post, how do you know who's reading it?

All these chilling questions are at the heart of Lottie Moggach's debut novel. It's the first book I've read to truly get to the heart of these unsettling issues and ask its reader to query the trust we now place in the internet, and social networking in particular.

Tess wants out. Out of her life, out of her family, out of the world. To help her slip away, Leila agrees to take on her identity online after Tess has taken her own life. Leila takes this project on at the request of Adrian,  a philosophical guru she has met on a discussion forum. For Leila is nearly housebound, cut off from normal life by years of caring for her mother,  an MS sufferer.

So that she can "be" Tess online, Leila embarks on an exhaustive trawl through Tess' s virtual past. With Tess's cooperation,  Leila sits at her computer and reconstructs Tess's life. She reads her emails, her Facebook updates, her entire digital backstory in her quest to become Tess. And of course she is quickly in too deep. Beautiful, flirtatious,  confident Tess is everything that Leila is not. Soon "being" Tess is more attractive than being Leila.

The premise is original but this is more than just a concept-driven novel. Leila is a captivating narrator. Personally,  I pitied her and wanted to protect her from the harm. However,  Leila is of course doing harm through her actions - even though she cannot see this herself. I've already enjoyed discussing Leila's actions and can see lots of bookgroups having a great chat about this very issue.

The novel really made me think about the idea of a digital footprint. So many people now rely upon the internet for communication,  and so many of us now meet people online. But why do we trust our screens? After reading Kiss Me First I've found myself thinking twice before updating my status and filling in my "friends" about my trip to the gym. Who knows who's reading it?

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The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton DiSclefani

Thea Atwell, fifteen,  precocious and handsome, has been sent away from her Florida home for committing a shameful sin that has destroyed her family. Her father, desperate to put some distance between Thea and her family in Florida, enrols her in the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls,  in the mountains of North Carolina, where Thea will meet the daughters of the wealthiest families in the South, who travel to Yonahlossee to become young ladies. Thea's time at Yonahlossee will change her forever...

At camp Thea meets Sissy,  a charming girl with a wardrobe to die for who quickly becomes her best friend, Leona, the prodigiously talented rider whose aloofness hides the financial difficulties her family are in, and the intoxicating Mr Holmes,  headteacher of Yonahlossee and father of three beautiful daughters. Thea quickly becomes entangled in the Holmes family's life,  teaching the three girls to ride during an enforced break from her own riding training, and developing an all-consuming crush on their father.

This fabulous coming of age novel by Anton DiSclefani follows Thea's journey to adulthood high in the mountains of North Carolina. By the time Thea comes to leave the camp, she is an entirely different girl from the naive teenager who arrived at Yonahlossee. Fans of Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep will eat this up - Thea has Lee Fiora's self-awareness, which makes her an excellent narrator.

This book has plenty more to enjoy.  Yonahlossee itself is a seductive paradise,  far from the concerns of depression-era America. The girls wear white uniforms and sleep in cabins between hazy days of formal education, baths outside, dances in the cabin and, of course, horse-riding lessons. The camp is set in beautiful mountains, perfect for night rides and days dreaming while staring out of the window. DiSclefani creates an enchanting bubble in the camp; it's so lovely you wonder how any of the girls can bear to leave it. Perhaps it's a symbol for the fleeting beauty of adolescence itself, an intoxicating time that once left can never be recaptured.

DiSclefani captures perfectly the relationship between teenage girls, a mixture of jealousy, closeness and distance which each girl must negotiate. Thea helps Sissy meet her boyfriend at night in the woods, breaking the camp's rules for her friend, but feels jealous as she does and seems to half wish that Sissy will be caught.

The boarding school novel is a classic for a reason: adolescence, a closed environment and a rigid sense of time passing all mean that these novels, from Mallory Towers to Harry Potter to Prep  have an enduring appeal. Yonahlossee is a new addition to this canon and destined to become a classic of the genre.

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton DiSclefani will be published on 6 June by Tinder Press. I must thank Helena Towers at Tinder Press who provided me with a review copy of this novel. 

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The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

Kirby should be dead. Attacked by a vicious murderer as a child, she somehow survived and grew up. Now she is an intern at a Chicago newspaper, trawling through crime records to trace her killer. Kirby is convinced she was the victim of a serial killer who has attacked before and will attack again.

And she's right. Harper Curtis attacked her with a knife, has killed before and will kill again. But what Kirby doesn't realise is that Curtis is almost untraceable. He has the perfect getaway vehicle - only in this case it's a house which allows him to roam Chicago through the ages, searching for the "shining girls" he is obsessed by. Curtis can travel forwards and backwards in time, killing and escaping justice.

With this original premise Lauren Beukes has created what I can imagine will be one of 2013's hottest crime fiction picks. It reminded me of Stephen King at his best,  merging horror and crime to produce a gripping thriller. The book is very well constructed, following Kirby's quest and Curtis' s rampages simultaneously. In lesser hands this could have been confusing (I confess here to having been terminally confused by The Time Traveller's Wife), but Beukes has clearly planned the novel very carefully and it is easy to follow both storylines.

The book is most satisfying when the "loops" of the storyline close together: when Kirby finds one of Curtis' s victims and pieces together what we as the reader have already seen happen,  or when we see Curtis' s viewpoint on the attack on Kirby. The parts of the book following Curtis's murderous outings to the future can be occasionally hard to read; the pity you feel for the victims can make it difficult to read about their horrific deaths at Curtis's hands.

I also really enjoyed the journey through Chicago's history in this novel.  Beukes has clearly done her research; we see a travelling circus of the 1940s, a college student in the 80s, a women's liberationist working in an abortion clinic in the 1970s. Having visited Chicago last year on holiday, I found this particularly interesting,  and made much more vivid by the precise references to streets and parks Beukes carefully gives us.

This fast-paced thriller deserves to be a summer hit: as a reader you care deeply about Kirby's quest for vengeance on the man who tried to steal her life, and fear Curtis's powers to destroy lives. The novel builds to a thrilling climax, and there's even a hint of romance for Kirby. A precision-made thriller, guaranteed to have you turning pages late into the night, made distinctive by the supernatural element.

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes will be published by Harper Collins on 25 April. I must thank the publishers who kindly provided me with a review copy via Net Galley.

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Ten Things I've Learnt About Love by Sarah Butler: vivid, contemporary women's fiction

Alice is losing her father. In their family home in North London, Malcolm is succumbing to the lung cancer that he has hidden from his daughter while she travels abroad. Recalled to London by her sisters,  Alice arrives just in time to see Malcolm before he dies.

Daniel is losing himself. Homeless and becoming ill, he wanders London searching for his lost daughter and leaving beautiful messages for her in the urban landscape. Daniel sees letters as colours,  and creates collages of detritus in which words are spelled by these colours.

Sarah Butler's moving novel follows Alice and Daniel's journeys as they learn about themselves and their feelings. It's beautifully crafted: colour is central to the novel, and the descriptions of Daniel's collages are a pleasure to read. The novel is also in some ways a love letter to London: in a touching sequence towards the end of the novel, Alice and Daniel walk through London together. Butler describes this walk with a poet's eye and a Londoner's love for the hidden corners of the capital.

Lists can sometimes be the sign of lazy writing; however, in this novel Butler uses them very effectively as a structural device. Each chapter alternates between Alice's and Daniel's viewpoint and opens with a list of what the character has learnt or felt since the previous chapter. The lists are compelling in their succintness; they are a really simple but original way of developing the characters for the readers.

One word of warning: this novel is truly moving and at times almost unbearably poignant. The writing is so vivid and the emotions of the characters so well observed that I found I couldn't race through it. Instead I found myself reading it piece by piece, letting the writing sink in before I was ready to move on.

All in all, I was surprised and touched by Ten Things I've Learnt About Love. An unusually finely-written novel which deserves to be a huge success.

I must thank Pan Macmillan, who kindly provided me with a copy of this novel at their women's fiction party.

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Rubbernecker by Belinda Bauer: superior crime fiction

Belinda Bauer's fine crime thrillers have been gaining her fans and critical acclaim since the publication of Blacklands in 2010, a gripping and disturbing novel set on the Yorkshire moors which focused on a serial killer. Hints of the moors murders gave the book a particularly chilling edge and the plot was tightly wound. It was a Richard and Judy pick and deservedly won the CWA Gold Dagger for the best crime novel of 2010.

For her latest novel Bauer has moved away from the Yorkshire setting of Blacklands and its followups, Dark Side and Finders Keepers. Rubbernecker follows the story of young Patrick Fort, an Aspergic anatomy student who stumbles across a murder during a dissection. Patrick feels compelled to trace both the anonymous victim and the murderer, despite facing hostility from the authorities.

In two parallel narratives Bauer also traces the story of the murder victim, who for the most part of his story is on life support in a ward for coma victims,  and the story of a nurse on the same ward who manages to seduce a rich visitor to the ward away from his barely conscious wife. I have to say that I enjoyed Patrick's narrative slightly more than these parallel stories; however, I appreciated the unusual setting of the coma ward, which Bauer used well to explore the difficulties and potentially murky ethics of caring for patients who have very little prospect of recovery.

Patrick is an engaging protagonist, possibly despite his Aspergic personality. There is a hint of The Curious Incident Of the Dog In The Night Time in Bauer's choice of an Aspergic young man as the detective in a crime mystery. However, Patrick is given depth by the inclusion of his childhood as his motivation. As a young boy, Patrick saw his father killed in a road accident, and has since been obsessed by death. Patrick's naivety and lack of comprehension of the emotional reality of death create a real sympathy for this vulnerable protagonist.

Like Bauer's previous novels, Rubbernecker has a cracking plot with a gripping chase scene. There's also some well judged comedy to lighten the mood of the book thanks to Patrick's student housemates. I found myself turning the pages at ever increasing speed as I got towards the novel's denouement. Another fine and unusual crime novel from Bauer: highly recommended.

Transworld kindly provided me with a review copy of this novel via net galley.

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How To Be A Good Wife by Emma Chapman

Marta Bjornstat's life looks perfect. A beautiful home, a handsome older husband,  a successful son. Emma Chapman's gripping debut novel shows us how little it takes for this facade of perfection to crumble and expose the huge and disturbing cracks in the Bjornstats' supposedly good marriage.

Marta begins to see a hauntingly frail girl in her home. The girl seems to be beside her, but she can't talk to her, and no one else can see her. Somehow we know she isn't exactly a ghost, and nor do we believe Marta's husband Hector,  who is angry that she has stopped taking her medication.

As this elegant novel progresses we see the cracks deepen. Hector has been keeping some disturbing secrets from Marta, and she has to struggle to find out the truth about her marriage. The world beyond her home, for so long the centre of her life, draws her away from the supposed safety of domestic comfort and into the challenge of working out her own identity.

Emma Chapman's debut novel is a compelling read. It is slim and economical, the spare narration seeming somehow appropriate for the Scandinavian setting. The lands of super stylish homes and lifestyles also seems very apt for a story about the illusion of a perfect marriage.

Chapman also manages the tension in the novel very well too. Marta's slow realisation of the truth is expertly managed and the central revelation,  when it does come,  is suitably shocking.

How To Be A Good Wife is a skilfully written domestic thriller: fans of Sophie Hannah, for example,  will love it. But it's also a chilling glimpse into a marriage, a meditation on how much of our identity we can sacrifice in the pursuit of a domestic ideal. I gulped it down almost whole and would urge you to do the same.

I must thank Emma Bravo of Pan Macmillan who kindly sent me a review copy of this novel.

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