Betrayal by Lesley Pearse
Because we couldn’t choose between these two exciting new releases, Pip Williams’ new novel, The Bookbinder of Jericho, is joined by the newest home-based suspense novel from one of the best household names in fiction.
Being one of the UK’s most celebrated and dependably engaging novelists, Lesley Pearse certainly needs no introduction. Readers everywhere are already familiar with her twisty evocations of toxic domesticity, inner turmoil, and long-buried secrets. And her expert storytelling, of course. Her newest slice of shattering suspense features all four of these things and is a guaranteed hit if you like your drama on the juicier side.
This book does come with a warning for depictions of domestic abuse and grooming.
It’s very unusual to marry a person without a single reservation. After all, who among us can say that we are always the best version of ourselves? Eve had some niggling worries about Don when she married him, but she was able to get past them. She had no way of knowing just how abusive he would become. It started with little things, small moments of uncontrolled temper, but soon she was ending up in the hospital. Leaving would mean uprooting her two beautiful children, Olly and Tabitha. And it would mean starting over with next to nothing. But staying would mean living with more fear and more pain.
Eventually, after another vicious beating, Eve resolves that this can go on no longer. She flees with her kids, moving to a seaside town before eventually being granted the legal right to move back into the family home. Don has moved on and is living elsewhere, but that doesn’t mean that she’s seen the last of him. Despite the legal arrangements, Don is hellbent on making life a living hell for Eve. He routinely turns up at the house, his bitterness and spite amplified by drunkenness, still tormenting her, ensuring that she can never fully heal, can never begin the next chapter in earnest, cannot devote her energies to crafting a new and better life for her family. Enough finally becomes enough and Eve decides it’s time to teach Don a lesson. But her act of retaliation goes disastrously wrong.
Now Eve has traded one crippling kind of fear for another. As she struggles to forge a new future for herself and her children, she is burdened with a secret that could ruin everything. A secret that forces her to ask herself: after having endured so much and having worked so hard to break free, has she betrayed the life that she, Olly and Tabitha might have been able to achieve?
A gripping and suspenseful work that also takes on some harrowing and hard-hitting topics, Betrayal is a domestic thriller from a master of the genre at the peak of her abilities.