Thank you to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster UK for this ARC.

Nancy North, 33, has had a psychotic break and is tryjng to rebuild her life and career as a chef. She moves into a new flat together with her boyfriend Felix, but soon after, her new neighbour Kira Mullan, 23, is found hanged. Nancy doesn't believe it was suicide and insists she was murdered, but without any concrete evidence and taking her precarious mental state into consideration, no one believes her. The police close the case and even worse, Nancy is sectioned due to the lies of her new neighbours and Felix, having to fight tooth and nail to get out again and prove she was right.

In Nicci French's stories the police on the whole do not get a good rep. They are dismissive, bumbling, idiotic and sexist. There is always one exception though. In the Frieda Klein novels it is DCI Malcolm Karlsson. Here it is DI Maud O'Connor who we have first encountered in Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter? I loved her there and I love her here. She gets stones thrown in her way at every turn, from her disapproving colleagues to the neighbours of the murdered woman, and she still stoically gathers her evidence and finds the truth, once she has come in contact with Nancy.

This isn't a simple whodunnit but a psychological thriller that examines what happens when it looks like a young woman has committed suicide and the police can't be bothered to investigate properly, especially when they dismiss the concerns of a neighbour purely on the basis of her apparent mentally unstable state and just decide a conclusion without ever doing proper police work.

I found this a hard and uncomfortable read. I refuse to believe that mental hospitals are that awful and that the police are quite that dumb when it comes to mental health. We know bad people exist but to see them in such a concentration of murder, lies, gaslighting, abuse and coercive control was a hard pill to take. I don't think I liked anyone apart from Nancy and Maud. Felix in particular was just wrapped in red flags from head to toe. He gaslit Nancy under the guise of sympathy and care for her but it was the opposite  - he used her mental illness to coercively control her, stalk her and badmouth her to others.  

The ending was realistic in that the wrong people took the credit, the neglectful landlord never got a rap on his fingers and the mental hospital continued to be allowed to mistreat people. This made the ending not very satisfactory to me. I'm glad though that Nancy's persistance paid off, and I really hope we will see Maud again in further cases. She could be the new Frieda Klein - strong, stubborn and doing her own thing, not fitting into any mould. I will read anything with her in it.