The Suspect

November 5, 2018
Fleet Street star Kate Waters’s reporting has helped British police crack some extremely disturbing cases, but she faces what could be her toughest one yet in bestseller Barton’s top-shelf third psychological thriller (after 2017’s The Child). When the parents of 18-year-old Alexandra O’Connor, who’s backpacking in Thailand with an 18-year-old female friend, fail to hear from Alex after a week, they alert the police. Kate’s longtime police source, Det. Insp. Bob Sparkes, tells her about the two missing teenage girls, in the hope that Kate will write a story that “might winkle them out of whichever bar they’re sitting in.” Kate keenly identifies with the concerned parents, since her estranged older son, Jake, has been in Thailand for the past two years after inexplicably dropping out of university. But what starts as a routine story soon proves otherwise, sending Kate and her journalistic frenemies to Thailand in search of answers. The exceedingly twisty tale that follows will test Kate, and her painfully conflicting loyalties, to the limit. Barton’s many fans will be rewarded. Agent: Madeleine Milburn, Madeleine Milburn Literary (U.K.).

An ensemble cast narrates a splashy front-page story about British teens dying in Bangkok. Clich�d roles come alive, each with its own narrator. Susan Duerden is the reporter; her BBC tone is broken up by adept accents for Thai and Dutch characters and the spiraling despair of a woman turned from an observer to a player. Fiona Hardingham gives the mother of a girl found dead in a dirty Thai hotel a fragile, exhausted misery spiked with fierce anger as the investigation grinds on with hideous pressure from the press. Nicholas Guy Smith voices the weary detective following up in England, and Katherine McEwan gives us the vulnerability and angst of victims in flashbacks. This one will keep you up at night. S.T.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine