The Lying Room
Neve is a graphic artist, a married mother-of-three in a London suburb. Juggling the pressures of work and family, dealing with a depressed teenage daughter and an increasingly distant husband, and confronting her fading youth, she has embarked on a clandestine affair with her boss.
But when she arrives at his flat one morning she discovers his dead body and a bloody hammer: he has been murdered. Frantic, she decides she has to remove all evidence of her presence at the flat and prevent the affair from becoming known. Panicked and full of guilt, she embarks on a campaign of deception that gets more and more complicated.
A police detective investigating the death speaks to everyone at the design firm where Neve works. She tries to behave normally, at work and at home, though stress and lack of sleep keep her wound tight. It’s clear that the detective suspects she knows things she’s not telling. To protect herself and those she cares about, Neve decides to try to find out for herself what happened.
Her suspicions shift among some of her longtime friends and even members of her family. With a well-rounded cast of characters, the story is compelling as it unfolds. Suspense builds as secrets are uncovered and danger mounts, leading ultimately to a surprising (and surprisingly satisfying) ending.
Nicci French is actually a husband-and-wife writing team: Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. Together they’ve written over twenty psychological thrillers, including a hugely popular eight-volume series featuring London psychotherapist Frieda Klein. The Lying Room, published in late 2019, is their most recent standalone novel, the first since finishing the Klein series.
Both authors studied English literature at Oxford University, but didn’t meet there. 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.
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 each continue to write separately, both fiction and non-fiction. They now live and write in Suffolk, near the east coast of England, though London neighborhoods and geography feature prominently in many of their novels.
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