Joanna Cannon is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling debut novel The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, which has sold over 250,000 copies in the UK alone and has been published in 15 countries. Soon after Clare is deserted by her husband, she meets new neighbour Louisa, who persuades her to help with a business venture, providing catering for funerals. It started slightly slow, but then quickly picked up and started giving “Single White Female” vibes. Early into this audiobook, I realised it was a thriller/suspense novel and was considering whether to finish it, as I want to take a break from the genre.

I picture a lot of people sitting around on furniture in relaxed poses—unnecessary visuals, enough is enough. Then someone will have a brainwave and dig out an old school photograph from the loft, one that’s faded and curled where time has eaten into us all, and they’ll climb down from the stepladder and cough and brush the dust from their clothes, and they’ll say, There she is, look, I’ve found her—she’s the one at the back, and they’ll have to point to make it clear: No, no, that one—the one you can’t see very well. And, in new novel A Tidy Ending, she combines complex characterisation and forensic plotting with that same captivating writing style.

Joanna Cannon weaves together a self-actualisation storyline featuring an endearingly quirky protagonist, with lashings of dark humour, revenge and jaw-dropping twists. But she's good at solving puzzles and there are times she sees things other people might have overlooked. This deliciously dark-ish, quirky story brilliantly comes together in a way that I never saw coming. At the same time, she tracks down the former resident of her house and befriends her, a little too closely. There are newspapers lying around, but every time I pick one up it has holes in the pages where articles have been removed.

Then, a glimpse into a new, beautiful life through a magazine addressed to the previous occupant of the house, and things start to change. A Tidy Ending by Joanna Cannon is a book that had me very intrigued and I must admit I wasn’t sure where the storyline was going. No matter the genre, I’ve always found Joanna Cannon’s combination of life experience and astute eye a potent mix on the page. The only reason I’m not giving this book five stars is because number one, I feel like I just read another book about Molly, and number two, Linda is a really exaggerated character. Linda decides that the best way for her to have the lifestyle she wants is to track down Rebecca and emulate her.A Tidy Ending’s lead character Linda’s first-person narrative, initially exudes a vibe similar to Nita Prose’ The Maid and Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, in that her world-view is small and heavily shaped by past traumatic events. Linda watches everything and says very little - she has few friends, and as the book goes further in, she’s either very sheltered, or on a spectrum - I plumped for the latter. A serial killer, a traumatized woman, the quirkiest of characters, such perfect observational writing-- Joanna Cannon is a superstar. The reason I was so impatient is that I read two other books this year that were about a quirky, loner woman— The Maid and One's Company—and I didn’t like either of them.