Tag: Psychological thriller

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

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Psychological historical thriller, The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, is a creepy, claustrophobic yet compelling tale set in 1960s rural Netherlands. 

That’s what happens when people die. They take themselves with them and you never ever find out anything new about them ever

Unmarried and almost 30, Isabel lives alone in the family home of her deceased parents in Overijssel. The house is willed to her older brother, Louis, upon marriage – making Isa’s habitation tenuous.

She belonged to the house in the sense that she had nothing else, no other life than the house, but the house, by itself, did not belong to her.

Isa is isolated and lonely and wound up like a spring. Her inner discomfort plays out through a desperate possessiveness of the house and its contents. She demands the maid, Neelke, keeps it in the way her mother liked it. She counts the spoons to ensure none go missing and accuses the maid when she can’t find things. Overall Isa is unlikable – a brittle, awkward and acerbic woman.

She was pretty in a way that men thought women ought to be pretty.

Louis is a man who falls in and out of love easily. When he turns up with Eva and installs her in their mother’s bedroom, Isa takes an immediate dislike to the women. She finds her grating and overly familiar. 

There isn’t a version of me that could’ve looked away from you.

Then Louis leaves the two women together and Isa’s anxieties escalate as Eva gets under her skin. But soon irritation turns into passion. To give more away would be a spoiler, suffice to say the third act focuses on Eva and has a brilliant twist.

She had held a pear in her hand and she had eaten it skin and all. She had eaten the stem and she had eaten its seeds and she had eaten its core, and the hunger still sat in her like an open maw. She thought: I can hold you and find that I still miss your body. She thought: I can listen to you speak and still miss the sound of your voice.

The Safekeep is a beautifully written story that delivers an emotionally resonant and complex read. But, in case you haven’t picked it up from the quotes, The Safekeep is also saucy. So if you can’t tolerate explicit sex scenes, it may not be for you. 

Book review: The Housemaid by Freida McFadden

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Plot twists abound in domestic suspense/psychological thriller The Housemaid by Freida McFadden. It’s got a feel of Sleeping With the Enemy meets Single White Female with its volatile domestic setting. The story involves a wealthy couple, Andrew and Nina. Their hired help, Millie, lives in a room in the attic.  

Sometimes people do exactly what you think they’re going to do, and they still manage to disappoint you.

Homeless ex-con Millie is hired by the frumpy, volatile, and slightly unhinged Nina. Her job is to keep house for Nina, her hot charming husband Andrew, and her precocious blonde daughter. The women of the household always wear white. 

“My mother always says the only way two people can keep a secret,” she says, “is if one of them is dead”.

Millie thinks Nina has hired her without looking into her past. She’s a little taken aback when shown to her small attic room. The window in the room won’t open, and the door has a lock on the outside. She decides to believe that the room was once just a storage cupboard, and it’s better than a prison cell. 

Then again, plenty of men are idiots.

There is also Enzo, the non-English speaking gardener who lurks outside muttering in Italian that the place is not safe. Millie assumes it’s because Nina is so difficult. 

Dad always says that if you’re going to do something wrong, at least be smart enough not to let anybody see you do it.

The Housemaid is full of plot twists, bizarre behaviour, and secrets and lies, like any good psychological thriller. Millie and Nina’s narration takes the reader on a roller coaster ride. Their crazy domestic life includes a doozie of a twist at the end. It’s a compelling fast read for lovers of domestic suspense. The Housemaid left me feeling like my life is comfortably pedestrian. 

Book review: Out of Breath by Anna Snoekstra

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The Australian outback is a beautiful, bizarre and dangerous place – where lots of people go to get away from their lives or themselves, or to find themselves. Out of Breath by Anna Snoekstra is a cultish psychological thriller about naive foreign tourists who disappear in the outback.

Jo’s life in England turned upside down when she was very young – she was rejected by her mother and bought up by an ambivalent father. At twenty-seven she is looking for a place where she feels she belongs. She drops out of Art school and a toxic relationship in London and travels to Sydney, Australia to start afresh.When her relationship with Eric in Sydney fails as well and she needs to fulfill visa requirements and working remotely for a period, she heads to a mango farm in northwest Western Australia.

Things soon start to get creepy and weird – can you hear the foreboding music?

He holds his nose and she sees his mouth open, a huge breath, then he’s under. She sees the bobble of his bum, his feet splashing the surface. Then nothing. Silence. Jo finds she is holding her own breath. After a few seconds, she lets it out. Ho-jin doesn’t come up. She scans the water, looking at the heads, the people sitting on the sand bed. No one is moving.

I thought Snoekstra did a great job of capturing the beauty, isolation, eccentricity and slight creepiness of the outback. It’s not surprise that around 40 people lose their lives in it each year.

There were many moments in this novel where I cringed at the naivety and stupidity of the main character who either had no common sense about the perils of the Australian outback – or simply didn’t care enough about herself to worry about them. Either way I think Jo’s near death experience in the desert made the idyllic community she stumbled into seem or the more utopian…but I guess that’s the vibe cult leaders set out to create.

What do you do when you have joined an paradisal tight knit isolated community and discover it is not what it claims to be? You’ll have to read this psychological thriller to find out…