The House Swap

March 5, 2018
British author Fleet makes her U.S. debut with a consummately plotted but character-challenged domestic noir. Working mom Caroline, eager to repair her marriage after she ends an affair, hopes that a low-stress, child-free week away with husband Francis will prove therapeutic. When she accepts an online invitation to exchange their flat in center-city Leeds for a house in suburban London, it’s clear from the start that Caroline has unwittingly let a malevolent presence into her home. It doesn’t take long in the London-area house for her to come across subtle clues with intense personal meaning—such as an open bottle of the same aftershave that her ex-lover, Carl, wore hidden behind the bedroom headboard—and to suspect she has stumbled into an elaborate game staged by someone who knows her intimately. The final pages include a stunning twist, but some readers may not stick around for the fireworks, since Caroline and Francis make for difficult company—she’s massively narcissistic, and he’s still fighting the depression and pill addiction that left him near catatonic around the time of the affair. Still, Fleet is a writer to watch. Agent: Caroline Wood, Felicity Bryan Assoc. (U.K.).

March 15, 2018
Marital infidelity, drug addiction, house swapping, stalking, and a surprise ending add up to a psychologically suspenseful story in British novelist Fleet's U.S. debut.When Caroline and Francis set out from their home in Leeds, they're already struggling to repair their troubled 15-year marriage. Their destination is a house in Chiswick, a London suburb, where they're doing a one-week house swap. As they settle into the sparsely furnished loaner house, Caroline finds pink roses and other things that remind her of a passionate extramarital affair she had two years earlier with Carl, a co-worker eight years her junior. Caroline soon suspects that her house-swap partner, S. Kennedy, is actually Carl and that her peculiar and intrusive Chiswick neighbor Amber may be a co-conspirator. Two timelines, stretching from 2012 to 2015, intersect to reveal why Carl ended the affair with Caroline, who S. Kennedy really is, and why S. Kennedy has gone to such extreme lengths to torment Caroline with reminders of Carl. The premise stretches believability, and why Caroline doesn't flee the Chiswick house is never adequately explained. Nor is it clear why she remains married to a man she dislikes or why he sticks it out with her when he knows she's guilty of more than infidelity. The unmasking of S. Kennedy spins the plot off on a tangent, multiple coincidences and contrivances undercut the story's credibility, and the denouement is unsatisfying as Caroline gets handed easy ways out of her problems. The story has some creepy and subtle moments, but their effect is diluted by an uneven pace, one-dimensional characters (all of whom are unhappy), and a gratuitous threat to Caroline and Francis' 4-year-old son.While this mediocre thriller may provide a fix for some die-hard fans of domestic noir, most readers will be disappointed.

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April 1, 2018
Caroline and her husband, Francis, have been through a rough patch, so Caroline decides to get them out of Leeds and into London, via a house-swapping site. She has never met the owner of the London home, but it's only for a week, so what can possibly go wrong? Turns out, quite a bit. The real reason Caroline wants a change of pace is because she's still bogged down by memories of an affair she had with a coworker, memories that come back with a startling swiftness as the days go by in the vacation home. The narrative moves from the past to the present and from character to character. As mysterious coincidences continue, and she and Francis keep fighting, Caroline is forced to reckon with her past before it rips apart the present. Fleet's debut domestic noir will hold a certain appeal to readers who love British thrillers, and, as the pace picks up in the second half, it will keep them turning the pages as the satisfying twists unfold.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)