The New Neighbors – Book Review

You know your neighbours are plotting a crime but no one believes you . . .

When Lena helps her teenage son gather sounds for his media studies project, she doesn’t expect her boom-microphone to pick up a conversation between her neighbours, the Morgans.

And she’s certain they are planning a crime.

Her family and friends tell her that she must have misheard. After all, the Morgans are a well-respected, upstanding couple in their early sixties. They’ve never been in trouble with the law.

Yet Lena can’t stop thinking about it. Because what if she hasn’t misheard? What if she can prevent something awful happening?

After all, stopping it could help ease her conscience about her own dark past . . .

The New Neighbours is Claire Douglas’s latest book.

In this book, Lena gets new neighbors–an older couple named Marielle and Henry. They both looked decent–Marielle used to be a professor at a university while Henry was a doctor. Lena’s son, Rufus was doing a college project with a boom set. So when Lena tries to take the boom set, she accidentally hears her neighbors talking–about getting rid of someone. Now Lena gets obsessed of finding out what her neighbors are up to even though it may even open a dark past that Lena wants to forget about.

The story is entirely told in the POV of Lena, Henry and a woman named Natalie, although Natalie’s POV is less. There is also a time shift when Henry met Marielle in the 80’s, young Lena working as a midwife in a hospital in late 90’s and getting embroiled in a case. The pacing of the story is overall fast and the reader gets curious about what Lena’s neighbors are really up to.

Not only this story talks about the neighbors–we also see the fact that Lena is trying to get along with the loneliness–being alone in the house as she is separated from Charlie and her son Rufus will be off to college soon. And because of her loneliness, soon she gets involved in the case which she should have not involved. The ending was for me a little expected but then a part of the ending was unexpected.

I enjoyed reading this author’s The Couple At No. 9 which prompts me to read more books from this author. This book in my opinion was OK though not s great as The Couple at No. 9 or The Wrong Sister. The pacing was good, some twists and turns are there and the ending was kind of unexpected.

Overall this book is worth four stars.