The Bed I Made

The Bed I Made
By Lucie Whitehouse
Bloomsbury £11.99, 320 pages
FT Bookshop price: £9.59

Kate flees London after the end of an affair, holing up in a sleepy, off-season harbour town on the Isle of Wight. Within days of her arrival, she becomes intrigued by the disappearance of a local woman. But it soon becomes clear that Kate has come to the island to enact a vanishing of her own. Who or what is she hiding from?

As she negotiates her place in this tiny community, a series of flashbacks reveals her intense romance with Richard and the peril that drove her into hiding. The narrative is punctuated with reminders of his pursuit, menace looming larger as the extent of his psychopathic obsession emerges.

Whitehouse revisits themes from her first novel The House at Midnight – mentally unstable lovers and the catastrophic consequences of rash choices. Yet The Bed I Made surpasses the earlier work in its assured rationing of suspense, and the reader yearns for the inevitable and rewarding crescendo of its final chapters.