PUBLISHED BY PENGUIN ON 31st MARCH 2022
Have you met the people next door?
They are charming. They are beautiful.
And they know the secrets that you keep.
They live in the Gardens – a quiet leafy corner of the countryside – but not so quiet that you can’t get decent coffee.
And don’t we all want to live in the Gardens?
A young married couple flee the city for a little corner of paradise, exchanging their flat with all its unhappy memories for a small honey-coloured house among the rolling green hills of Oxfordshire.
Their new home is their dream. Their new neighbours are welcoming. The Gardens feels like the perfect place for the Wades – Lana and Roman, a photographer and a doctor – to begin again.
The Wades are an attractive, popular couple. But they are also a couple with a secret, a secret buried in the life they have left behind, a secret they have shared with no one. But their new neighbours – these friendly, affluent, educated men and women in the Gardens – have secrets of their own.
Terrible secrets. Unimaginable secrets.
The true story of an unhappy wife who ran away. The true-crime of a happy family who lived – and so tragically died – in Lana and Roman’s new home.
As Lana struggles to adjust to her new life in paradise, she begins to believe that these events are somehow connected.
And Roman increasingly thinks that his beloved wife is going out of her mind, still traumatised by what happened to them in their old life.
And they can’t both be right.
The People Next Door is a psychological thriller full of shocking turns and twists – a murder mystery wrapped in a love story, and a love story wrapped in a murder mystery. It is about the hard truths we all hide – and what we will do for love.
Tony Parsons is a bestselling novelist and an award-winning journalist. His books have been published in over forty languages and his multi-million selling novel Man and Boy won The Book of The Year prize in 2000. Most recently, he created the Max Wolfe crime series. Tony lives in London with his family.
This was intriguing from the very beginning as I wasn’t sure who were the good people, particularly the husband, was he really just trying to get his wife locked away? I had to keep reading, who needs to sleep anyway! I loved the twists and turns so I was constantly surprised at what was going on. This is the first book I have read by Tony Parsons and I loved it so will be looking out for the next one. Well worth getting this put on your booklist.