Once upon a time, fifteen-year-old Joseph Flowers shot dead his parents and baby brother, while his younger sister Celestine ran and hid. The family home became known as “The Red House”, the story becoming the source of much speculation, especially about Joseph’s motives. Because the following day, Joseph crashed his car and has been in a coma for the past twenty years. And Celestine disappeared…

Now Eve, the former Celestine, finds herself drawn back to the Red House. Her grandmother, Joseph’s carer, is dying and Eve finds herself forced to revisit the events. Is it possible that she was wrong about what she saw? But if Joseph was innocent, then the real killer has escaped justice for twenty years – and presumably wants to keep it that way.

I’ve been looking forward to this book for a while – Roz Watkins wrote three great novels pre-pandemic, The Devil’s Dice, Dead Man’s Daughter and Cut To The Bone, but this is the first book since then. It’s a standalone – the first three feature DI Meg Dalton – and my goodness, it’s dark.

The first half of the book is somewhat hard going. Eve’s life is incredibly bleak, isolated, struggling with life due to her inability to distinguish faces, determined to hide her identity from the true crime enthusiasts. On top of that, it does take a little while for the shape of the book to take form, for there to be a genuine reason to suspect that Joseph might not be the killer. I’m not really in a place where I want to be reading something that’s too dark at the moment, and if it wasn’t for my faith in what Roz had written before, I’m not entirely sure that I’d have persevered.

But I did, and thank goodness that I did. Not that it gets much lighter, although Eve’s life does get a little more light in it in the second half, but what becomes clear is what a exquisitely constructed thriller this is. There was one point in particular when I thought I had everything figured out only for the author to, perfectly fairly given the rules that had been laid out, pull the rug out from under me. In fact, I’m struggling to remember the last time a final chapter revealed that I had been well and truly outwitted.

So, dark, but definitely worth persevering with as the end result is rather marvellous.

The Red House is out on 22^nd June in hardback and ebook from HQ. Many thanks for the review e-copy.