If someone told me that I would be reading loads of thrillers in the future, I wouldn’t have believed them. I do like reading the odd one or two here and there, but I find that thrillers tend to be a bit samey. However, The House was a different type of thriller and a type that I haven’t read before.

What if your perfect home turned out to be the scene of the perfect crime?

Londoners Jack and Syd moved into the house a year ago. It seemed like their dream home: tons of space, the perfect location, and a friendly owner who wanted a young couple to have it. So when they made a grisly discovery in the attic, Jack and Syd chose to ignore it. That was a mistake. Because someone has just been murdered. Right outside their back door.

And now the police are watching them…

One of the things that I really liked about this book was that the whole mystery was told from the two perspectives of our main characters: Jack and Syd. They are writing their own ‘book’ about what happened to them you can see them writing back to each other as the story goes on. Another thing that intrigued me about this book was that we don’t actually know what’s happened for quite a while. I didn’t read the blurb for this book so I didn’t know that someone had been murdered right outside Jack and Syd’s house. And because I didn’t know that, all of the mystery that was building up to the reader finding out what had happened just kept me reading on because I really wanted to find out what each little mystery meant.

“She would have called Evan an oily, misogynistic creep, and perhaps also pointed out that it was attitudes to women like his that had kept our society rooted in the dark ages and political power in the hands of the privileged, penis-wielding few.”

– The House, Simon Lelic

My final verdict? I was impressed in how Simon wrapped it all up and the massive reveal didn’t seem that far-fetched, but it did at the same time? Is that possible? I can understand where Lelic is coming from with the whole reveal and I can understand why that would happen, but in order for that reveal to work, there had to be a lot of far-fetched things that had to happen and big leaps and bounds that just didn’t make sense. The reveal would have worked so much better if these things didn’t happen.

I didn’t really think much of the character of Syd either. I thought she was really rude and came across and harsh and abrupt and I just couldn’t connect with her at all.

BUT! I really did like Lelic’s conversational way of writing and it helped me ease into the story much easier and the use of the first-person point of view was handy because it meant that following the story was easier as well.

Overall, this book was a really good, fast-paced read but the reveal and the whole wrap-up of the mysteries ruined it for me. It’s always the reveals that ruin a thriller book for me. They’re never as good as I want them to be which is annoying.

Warning: this book has triggers for suicide and self-harm.

Disclaimer: this book was sent to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review