The Family Next Door by Sally Hepworth

Essie’s living a quiet life in suburban Melbourne. She suffered severe postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter, and her husband and mother have been on edge since the birth of her second. Cracks are starting to show, and when a mysterious woman named Isabelle moves into the neighborhood, Essie becomes fascinated with her and goes a little Single White Female. Isabelle seems to be looking for a missing child, and thinks Essie might be involved. There’s some side plot drama with two other neighbors, Ange and Fran, (affairs, cuckolding, etc.) that help round out the narrative a bit, but the main, and weird, story is between Essie and Isabelle. It’s not quite full-on suspense, but the twist is interesting and it makes you question the limits and boundaries of human memory. Can we really forget that we did something terrible in a traumatic and psychotic state?

The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena

The Couple Next Door, by Shari Lapena, begins with Marco and Anne returning home from a dinner party next door to find their baby girl missing. They left her there asleep and took the baby monitor with them, and even checked on her every half an hour, but somewhere between the checking, wine drinking, and Marco's naughty flirting with their neighbor, Cynthia, little Cora goes missing. Suspicion immediately falls on the parents. Did Anne kill her as a result of her postpartum depression? Did Marco have her abducted in order to swindle his wealthy in-laws out of a hefty ransom? The detectives investigating this case sense that all is not right in this house, and rightly so, but where the final guilty finger points to is not so immediately obvious.

What is obvious is that this novel is just not up to the same bar as some of the other great domestic suspenses of the last few years. If you loved Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train you'll enjoy this one, but it's not going to make you say "WOW" and tell all your friends about it. The characters felt a little flat, and some seemed to disappear altogether. After so many good books with unreliable first person narrators, to have the whole thing done in the third person ends up feeling cold and unpersonable. The final scene is one last little "twist," which will work great if it's made into a movie, but seemed to come from nowhere. As least this author got creative in her title though, and refrained from using the word 'girl' in it. Thank you!