The Other Woman's House

June 4, 2012
In Hannah’s somewhat muddled sixth mystery featuring Det. Sgt. Charlotte “Charlie” Zailer and Det. Constable Simon Waterhouse (after 2011’s Cradle in the Grave), Connie Bowskill spots a woman lying in a pool of blood while Connie’s taking a virtual tour of a Cambridge house for sale at 11 Bentley Grove. But when she calls her husband, Kit, to look, the body is gone. Despite Kit’s protests that she must have imagined it, Connie goes to the police, and Simon’s fellow detective, Det. Sgt. Sam Kombothekra, gets the case, Simon and Charlotte being away on their honeymoon. Meanwhile, Connie becomes convinced that Kit is leading a double life based out of 11 Bentley Grove. When another woman reports seeing the same woman’s body, the police—now including Simon and Charlie, who have returned from their honeymoon—realize they might have an actual murder to solve. There’s an unpleasant tinge to Charlie and Simon’s usual banter, while the plotting is subpar.

Starred review from May 1, 2012
In the terrifying opening pages, Connie and Kit Bowskill fear being killed because of the Gilpatrick family. Just a week earlier, Connie had seen a woman lying face down in a pool of blood at 11 Bentley Grove, Cambridge, England, when she did a virtual tour of the house on her laptop late at night, a quest fueled by tracing that address and figuring out why it was marked as home on Kit's GPS system. The body had vanished when she tried to show it to Kit, leaving Connie with a strong mistrust of her husband and a fear of being thought mad. Left with either saying she imagined the body or calling Detective Simon Waterhouse, she opts for the latter, disrupting Simon and Charlie Zailer's two-week honeymoon at a villa in Spain. Simon, referred by his former love interest who is Connie's homeopath, doesas advertised believe the unbelievable, eventually uncovering a train of events put in motion by an obsessed person seeking satisfaction at any cost. Police documents scattered throughout the text sustain the level of foreboding, a plethora of real-estate information notwithstanding, and a final twist proves the perfect coda for this exemplar of psychological suspense.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)