THE BED I MADE

Lucie Whitehouse (Bloomsbury, £11.99)

We all have our favourite books and our reasons for liking them. Sometimes it’s a story that you can read time and again without ever getting bored, sometimes it’s a timeless epic, sometimes it’s a feat of imagination that you feel could never be surpassed.

The Bed I Made is unashamedly none of these things, and is unlikely ever to be in your top five of all time. However, as an engaging thriller to read on the train and pass on to a friend, it really works.

This is Oxford graduate Whitehouse’s second novel and is the story of an insular translator, Kate, who moves from London to the Isle of Wight to escape her psychopathic ex-boyfriend, Richard.

Although searching for peace, Kate quickly ends up embroiled in yet another drama, that of a local missing woman Alice Frewin and her grieving husband.

All the while, the threat of Richard looms like a dark cloud, exposing Kate’s deepest fears and making them a reality.

The narrative is more successful in the first half of the book. You aren’t quite sure what has happened between Kate and Richard and the past is unravelled through some effective, sexy flashback chapters. Whitehouse’s ability to build tension is significant and it’s a gripping read from page one, even if it does lose a little pace once all the secrets are revealed.

Kate is also easy to sympathise with as the lonely, injured heroine and although the other characters are a little two-dimensional (the kindly older widower, the comforting employee, the surly sailor) they serve their purpose. The menacing Richard is deliciously unhinged — every woman’s fantasy and worst nightmare rolled into one.

I suspect The Bed I Made’s up-to-the-minute tone and setting will prevent its having much longevity but it’s not aspiring to that — this is a book for the train or the holiday sun-lounger and it occupies that space admirably. The plot is rather predictable: it’s more of a soap opera than the feature film its 300 pages suggests and the ending is crying out for a spellbinding twist that never comes. However, I got through the whole thing in under a week, so Whitehouse must be doing something right and no doubt will stay in business for many novels to come.