Marian Lane is the best selling author of a series of cosy mysteries, but she is determined to end the series, to the horror of her fans and, given the plans for the final book, her agent as well. But everything else in her life takes a back seat when a fire breaks out at her home and her husband, Dane, is found dead, having apparently taken a fatal overdose of the painkiller fentanyl.

As Marian’s past life comes back to haunt her, help arrives in the form of Mary, a local woman who claims not only to be Marian’s biggest fan but that she saw the fire and spoke to Dane as he died. Only she can’t quite remember what he said…

As Mary entwines herself into Marian’s life, it seems that both of them have stories to tell. But who is telling the truth? Or is the truth something that has yet to be told?

Always be careful of first impressions. I nabbed a review copy of this from NetGalley and started it… and nothing desperately leapt out to me. Oh, it was well-written, but I’ve seen a lot of dual-time mildly-unreliable narrator books and they rarely turn out to be anything special. The last book I read was the latest Poe & Tilly title from M W Craven, so I wanted something that was a little more than just another guessable psychological thriller.

So I stopped. I even told NetGalley that I wouldn’t be reviewing it. And then I realised that I wanted to know what was going to happen, even though I was pretty sure I could see where it was going. After all, the title and something else seemed to be giving it away…

Hello, my name is Puzzle Doctor and I am an idiot. This is a damn clever book.

I’m not going to say much about the plot because I don’t want to drop any hints about where the story goes. Plus points, by the way, for the blurb, that doesn’t spoil a thing about the book either. So instead, let me illustrate the book in a different way.

You know how so many books have blurbs that say “for fans of Agatha Christie”? This one doesn’t, but it does drop plenty of mentions, with the sole escape for a lonely troubled young woman being her mystery novels. But it really should.

It might not have the traditional structure of a Christie novel, but you know that feeling when you discover what was going on, and how so many things were there pointing at the truth but you didn’t spot the importance of any of them? Ever single twist in this story – and there are quite a few on top of simply “whodunnit” – is foreshadowed in a way that you won’t spot.

Oh, and it’s damn well written too, with two distinct voices telling the story. Both the plot and the characters lead the reader in completely the wrong direction, and even as things coalesce towards a surprising ending (in more ways than just a surprising solution) there are still plenty of misdirections.

All in all, this was a great read, a genuine surprise. Hussey has written some other crime novels, the Jericho series. Guess my TBR pile is going to get a bit bigger…

The Woman Who Wasn’t There is out today in hardback and ebook from Zaffre. Many thanks for the review e-copy via NetGalley.