Watching From The Dark by Gytha Lodge

The prologue sucks you in from the very first sentence, letting you know that you’re in for an edge-of-the-seat, gripping rollercoaster of a journey as you turn the pages of a story that will have you questioning everyone… even the police.

When Aidan witnesses what he believes is the murder of his girlfriend; Zoe, he knows he should call the police but if he does, he’ll open up a can of worms in his life. Can they solve the case with him making an anonymous call?

DCI Jonah Sheens and his team need to piece together Zoe’s life and work out who would have killed her; luckily for us readers, Lodge introduces chapters from the past allowing us to begin to draw our own conclusions on what happened. Who will solve the case first – DCI Sheens’ team or me; the reader?

It turns out not to be an easy case to solve, just as I thought I’d figured it out, Lodge would reveal more secrets about Zoe’s friends or Aidan and I’d be back to square one, albeit with more background information.

As you all know, I love a good psychological thriller, I seem to thrive off the adrenaline as twists are revealed and Lodge did everything in her power to ensure I was running on adrenaline throughout! The twists were exceptional and at one time they were coming so regularly I was gasping out loud from the shocking reveals.

As I said earlier, Lodge casts suspicion on not only the suspects but also brews up this sense of concealment within the detective’s team, are their secrets relevant to the case?

Lodge throughout this book showed such a knack at really exploring the darkest and most vulnerable thoughts of all her characters, which in a way, created a level playing field for the reader to not only understand each individual character but also allowed the eventual reveal of the killer to be a total surprise… it could have been any of them. To me, this was the success of this story, Lodge was the master of the story all along and could have weaved the story into any ending she wanted, to deliver it in the way she did, showed how exceptional she is as a writer.

Without a doubt, Lodge has jumped on to my “instant buy author list”, her writing style is exquisite.

Watching from the Dark is out now in hardback and eBook versions from Michael Joseph.

I was lucky enough to receive a proof copy to read, this review is my way of saying THANKS.

Until next time, Chloé x