A dream house becomes a nightmare dwelling in J P Delaney’s uber impressive debut novel, THE GIRL BEFORE.
Stick Girl in the title these days and you’re assured a bestseller it seems, but THE GIRL BEFORE is bound to sweep away Gone, Girl and Girl on a Train on equal merit and not just marketing spin.
“Sometimes I have a sense that this house- our relationship in it, with it, with each other -is like a palimpsest or pentimento, that however much we try to over paint Emma Matthews, she keeps tiptoeing back: a faint image, an enigmatic smile, stealing its way into the corner of the frame.”
The girl before is Emma, whose story unfolds in alternate chapters with Jane, the girl currently resident at One Folgate Street.
The property is a one bedroom house architecturally engineered by Edward Monkford, run by a Siri styled housekeeper, a nano nanny whose ruler over the knuckle discipline for domestic neatness is nitpickingly sinister.
Delaney, a pseudonym for a creative director of a major UK advertising agency, starts the story with a droll, delightfully funny and quite benign tone which gathers unease as thresholds are crossed and leaseholds become leash holds.
From breezy digs at the real estate market, THE GIRL BEFORE spirals into a Fifty Shades style of erotic thriller before emerging as a whodunnit of high calibre.
Edward Monkford is a latter day Howard Roark, Ayn Rand’s alpha male architect from The Fountainhead, a property perfectionist with an edifice complex. He’s a Don Juan of design who seduces his female tenants by a carnal candour that is intoxicating. He remains a constant, the personification of a groundhog day that both girls go to ground in.
Emma, the girl before, moved into the house with a mouse of a spouse, Simon, who was quickly usurped by the cuckolding Monkford. Emma was the victim of a home invasion and is not beyond manipulating her trauma, laying the foundation for a labyrinth of lies.
Jane, the current occupant of One Folgate Street, is grieving the still birth of her first child. Without partner, her seduction by Monkford has none of the adulterous baggage, however Emma haunts the relationship as a spectre of suspicion.
Is Monkford a murderer, a serial lady killer, with bodies buried in the basement and missing a layer of insulation in his attic.
THE GIRL BEFORE twists and turns with a double helix of horror and homicide; eerie, erotic and guiltily, pleasurably entertaining.
THE GIRL BEFORE by J. P. Delaney is published by Quercus