Ignoring the party downstairs in her house, Natalie listens to her husband cry across the hall and feels nothing but revulsion. It turns out that James has recently spent 20,000 pounds of their savings, including an inheritance from Nat’s grandmother, that they’d intended to use for IVF. She confronts him; he claims he used the money to pay off his brother, who’d been planning to blackmail Nat because of some letters they found that seemed to suggest she’d murdered several of her exes. Thus begins Darlington’s twisted, twisty thriller. As revealed through a series of flashbacks, three of Natalie’s former boyfriends—real pieces of work, all of them—have ended up dead, seemingly the victims of accidents or self-defense. Each time, Nat suffered a blackout, so she can’t remember actually pushing anyone, or poisoning them, or stabbing them with a kitchen knife. She does remember having fits of uncontrollable rage, triggered by scenarios that echo her traumatic childhood. And James’ decision to pay away their life savings is certainly making her see red…Like many contemporary thrillers, this one plays with a nonlinear timeline as well as a few different points of view; unlike some thriller writers, while she certainly draws on tropes of the genre, Darlington manages to include some genuine surprises, weaving themes of mental illness and family trauma with a sense of mystery. At the center of it all is Natalie herself: flawed, mistreated, and distrustful, but also strong. She, and Darlington, refuse to let bad men get away with doing bad things.
