Katherine Macalister stays up too late caught up in an engrossing domestic thriller

There are some books that you savour, that you save for a long weekend or a holiday.

I didn’t have the luxury, but I knew it was going to be a long night once I had turned the first page of Lucy Atkins’ The Other Child because it ticked all the boxes.

Pigeon-holed into the chick noir niche, it is a suspenseful domestic thriller, and more than that a situation that could happen to anyone.

The premise is a newly-married couple who move to the US. Tess’ husband Greg is in paediatrics and is headhunted to work at a new hospital, and she is a photographer who follows him and decides to work from home.

Tess already has a nine-year-old son to worry about and settle into a new school, but she is also pregnant so has rather heightened perceptions.

As time goes on, almost imperceptibly their relationship changes, doubts set in and cracks begin to show.

Greg works long hours and is never home. Tess finds it hard to settle into suburban America, a situation we can all empathise with.

But what Lucy Atkins is so good at, is embroiling you from the word go into being as uncertain as Tess is about what she suspects, feels and knows, how paranoid she is, how difficult and inflexible she becomes, until her life unravels to such a degree that you are her and she is you.

I won’t give the game away but suffice to say all is not what it seems, and the sun was coming up when I turned the final pages to learn the couple’s fates.

And even after I’d closed Lucy Atkins’ book regretfully once and for all, the story has stayed with me since.

I can’t wait for the next one.

The Other Child by Lucy Atkins, Querus, £7.99. On Friday, September 11, Lucy Atkins will be joined by fellow Oxfordshire author Clare Mackintosh at Blackwell’s Bookshop, Oxford, to take part in a discussion on the psychological thriller genre (£3, 7pm to 8pm).

Call 01865 333623 or visit blackwell.co.uk