The Other Side of the Door

Three middle-aged women in England share their lives and have more in common than they think. Anne Flosnik uses an Australian accent that is easy to listen to and appropriate to the story. She has a facile way of changing characters, giving them their own voices without being extreme. The women's relationships are complicated. The men in their lives cause heartaches and rivalries. But it takes a real friend to help dispose of the body of an old lover. The device of "before" and "after" used to tell the story is somewhat distracting and makes it a bit difficult to figure out the plot. As a result, listening requires concentration. N.K.L. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

March 15, 2010
At the start of this pitch-perfect thriller from British author French, the husband-wife team of Sean French and Nicci Gerard, band singer Bonnie finds her “summer fling” boyfriend and fellow band member, Hayden, dead on the floor of a friend's London apartment. She proceeds to hide the corpse and obliterate every sign of her presence at the crime scene. This course of action is, predictably, full of pitfalls. Hayden's well-known involvement with other women could have provided Bonnie a motive for murder. To complicate matters, at least one more person appears to have altered the crime scene. Told in a tantalizing series of flashbacks, the narrative draws you into the inner world of the protagonist, a “tough cookie” who nevertheless endures a relationship that's so abusive the reader is never quite sure that she did not, in fact, snap. French (Until It's Over
) takes the time to tease out individual characters to a degree seldom seen in crime fiction, saving the final plot twist for the last page.