House of Correction
by Nicci French
When the book opens, Tabitha is at absolute bottom—or she will be, as soon as she fully absorbs her situation. She’s in prison, charged with murder, but she’s sure the authorities will soon realize it’s all a mistake and let her go.
Her lawyer says the case against her is strong. A man’s body was found in her shed, wrapped plastic. He’d been stabbed multiple times and Tabitha was covered with his blood. More evidence starts piling up. Tabitha knows she didn’t do it., but nobody believes her.
Minutes before her first hearing, her lawyer advises her to plead guilty to a lesser charge. Tabitha refuses, and fires the lawyer. She goes into the hearing without a legal representative, pleads not guilty to the charge of murder, and insists that she will conduct her own defense—even though she knows nothing about legal issues or how court proceedings work.
Tabitha proceeds to investigate the murder from inside prison, requesting copies of evidence and asking questions of her visitors. But by the time the trial starts, she still hasn’t got much idea of how to proceed. She does her best to question witnesses, but the judge takes offense at her often inappropriate language and demeanor.
Tabitha desperately wants to convince the jury she’s not guilty. But more than that – she wants to find out what really happened.
Nicci French is actually a husband-and-wife writing team: Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. Together they’ve written twenty-two psychological thrillers, including a hugely popular eight-volume series featuring London psychotherapist Frieda Klein. The House of Correction, published in fall 2020, is their most recent standalone novel.
Nicci’s early career included working with emotionally disturbed children and teaching at university before moving into magazine publishing. Her first marriage ended in divorce in 1989, leaving her with two young children. She and Sean met at the New Statesman magazine, where she was an editor and he had a monthly column. They married in 1990, and together had two daughters in the early 1990s. Meanwhile both launched writing careers, separately publishing both fiction and non-fiction books.
In 1995 they began work on their first joint novel, combining their names to create the pseudonym of Nicci French. That novel, The Memory Game was published in 1997 to considerable acclaim, launching their tandem writing career.
Nicci and Sean now live and write in Suffolk, near the east coast of England, though their urban roots stay with them: London neighborhoods and geography feature prominently in many of their novels.
[Click here to sign up to my book club — I’ll send you notices of new reviews when I post them.]