Sophie Hannah - Lasting Damage

review by Malcolm on show
Lasting Damage by Sophie Hannah 2011 RRP £12.99 (hardback), £6.99 Kindle

About the Author

Sophie Hannah is a bestselling crime fiction writer and poet. Her psychological thrillers Little Face, Hurting Distance, The Point of Rescue, The Other Half Lives and A Room Swept White have received critical acclaim and have been translated into more than fifteen languages. She lives in Cambridge with her husband and two children. She was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge while my son, Guy, was studying Medicine there and he is acknowledged at the end of the novel for supplying the necessary gruesome facts about malodorous bodies and mummification.

Product Description from the Back Cover

It's 1.15 a.m. Connie Bowskill should be asleep. Instead, she's logging on to a property website in search of a particular house: 11 Bentley Grove, Cambridge. She knows it's for sale; she saw the estate agent's board in the front garden less than six hours ago.

Soon Connie is clicking on the 'Virtual Tour' button, keen to see the inside of 11 Bentley Grove and put her mind at rest once and for all. She finds herself looking at a scene from a nightmare: in the living room, in the middle of the carpet, there's a woman lying face down in a huge pool of blood. In shock, Connie wakes her husband Kit. But when Kit sits down at the computer to take a look, he sees no dead body, only a pristine beige carpet in a perfectly ordinary room . . .


My Review

This is the second of her novels I have read, A Room Swept White was a little disappointing for me but not this novel. It is a tense standoff between a neurotic paranoid Connie and her super suave husband Kit. The live in idyllic Melrose Cottage, Little Holling, Silsford but are rather too close to Connie’s overbearing parents. Kit has once before tried to get her to move to Cambridge – 18 Pardoners Lane – but she bottled out and they stay in Melrose Cottage for several further years. But Connie is only too aware of her weaknesses and develops an obsession with Cambridge houses which is why she has been covertly visiting Cambridge and is looking on an estate agents website in the early hours. Next day she reports the sighting of the body to the police but no one can find it again on the website and when Cambridge police go round to check the property they find no evidence of a murder, but the owner – a doctor from nearby Addenbrookes Hospital – unaware her house is even for sale is so disturbed by the association with a possible murder that she moves into a hotel until the house can be sold. Connie also discovers that her husband Kit’s SatNav has the murder location 11 Bentley Grove set as his home address, he denies he entered it and blames her and their tit for tat game of blame and accusation continues. It is a tale of mutual suspicion, paranoia and the macabre mentality of a ruthless stalker. But who is the stalker? A gripping mystery which holds the reader’s attention right until the end.

The police characters involved in the investigation have appeared in earlier novels and there are subplots of detective Charlie Zailer and Simon Waterhouse on their honeymoon and other officers’ romantic entanglements. Charlie and Simon’s earlier adventures feature shortly in an ITV drama “Case Sensitive” – I’ll be watching it.

Oh yes and if you read this on Kindle there are Evidence Document images that are too small to read – but moving the Kindle cursor to them reveals a magnifying tool – I only found out half way though but the images are important in their chilling revelations of the target of the stalker.

An excellent thriller which I highly recommend. One reviewer even wrote on Amazon
“I can confidently say that I have read the best book that I will read in 2011”

MFMartland Broadcast on Radio Scilly 7 April 2011