The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena

The Couple Next Door book is a psychological thriller by bestselling author Shari Lapena.

I’d heard really positive things about The Couple Next Door and as it was both a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, I was keen to see what the fuss was all about!

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Genre: Thriller

Author: Shari Lapena

Buy: Amazon | Waterstones

Published: 2016

Plot

A seemingly respectable couple, Anne and Marco, attend a dinner party at their neighbour’s house. After being let down by their babysitter, Marco persuades a reluctant Anne to leave their six-month-old baby, Cora, at home alone.

Marco convinces Anne if they take the baby monitor and pop back home every half an hour, everything would be fine. Inevitably, everything is not fine. When returning home the baby has gone.

The book switches perspective throughout, from Anne’s frantic hysteria and Marco’s panic to Detective Rasbach’s calm and detached theorising.

As we start to see through the “perfect family” facade, the family’s secrets and deceptions soon start to unravel.

Who has taken Cora? And why?

The Couple Next Door Book Review

The Couple Next Door is a fast-paced story and with a small cast of suspects, you become distrusting of almost everyone. For that reason, it is, if you pardon the cliché, a real page-turner. It is full of twists and turns and kept me guessing until the end.

You can perhaps see how the parents felt they could justify leaving their baby at home alone, believing she would be safe. However, the story develops with varying degrees of plausibility. Marco, the male protagonist, seemed to lack any semblance of intelligence or integrity. Meanwhile the other characters were presented as pantomime villains.

I’d have preferred a bit more depth to the characters, perhaps to help explain their quite frankly bizarre decision making.

Having said that I did find the story gripping. You can imagine the desperation of finding your baby missing and the guilt and accusations that would follow. It’s every parent’s worst nightmare and you can easily see how a family can be judged after making one (completely stupid) mistake. I felt that part was done really well.

Overall, I found the book to be really gripping and it made me wonder how I would react in a similar position. Despite the implausibility of some of it, I did find myself wanting to find out what happened. I just would have preferred a bit more nuance when it came to the characters.