ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – Dead Heat by Sabine Durrant

Dead Heat by Sabine Durrant will be published on 12th March 2026 by Century. My thanks to the publishers for the proof copy.

Former journalist Matt Grimshaw’s life is at a low ebb. He’s been ‘let go’ by the paper where he’s worked for years, and his relationship with his long-term girlfriend has come unstuck.

So when an invitation arrives from his two closest friends, Celia and Adam Murphy, to join them at their house in Greece, he jumps at it.

It may be harsh and unwelcoming on the Mani Peninsula but Matt determines to stay there for the whole summer and to write his much put-off screen-play.

But then the Murphys plus children arrive, and a wealthy newcomer to the area starts throwing loud and lavish parties in his big house across the bay.

As the nights become hotter and the parties wilder, everyone’s motivations darken. Envy rises, resentments grow – until a terrible accident stops the summer in its tracks.

At least, it looks like an accident…

Set over one blazing Mediterranean summer, Sabine Durrant’s new thriller is tense, claustrophobic and utterly gripping.

Dead Heat is narrated by Matt Grimshaw. Down on his luck after both his relationship and his work as a journalist ended, he goes to Greece to stay with his best friend, Adam Murphy and his wife Celia. Adam is everything Matt is not. He’s a successful TV presenter, he is charming and congenial, a generous host and a fun person to be around, but tensions rise when somebody else arrives in the area who threatens to derail the summer and seriously muddy the waters.

To say anymore about the story itself would be to risk spoilers and I think it’s better to just let it all unfold, just as it would have done for Matt. I read Dead Heat fairly slowly because I wanted to savour every detail, every exchange between Matt and the other characters, and every move he made, all expertly set up by the author so that she could draw all the strands together for the finale.

For me, this is a masterclass in plotting and everything I want in a literary thriller. There is a languid build up, the edgy feel of a hot, claustrophobic summer full of resentment and covetousness, an unreliable narrator, and then the conclusion where it all converges to great effect. I thought several times throughout that I knew what had happened and that I’d guessed a twist, but I was wrong.

The writing is absolutely spellbinding, the story is quietly menacing and the characters are unstable and/or untrustworthy. Put together, Dead Heat is quite simply superb.

Dead Heat is Sabine Durrant’s seventh work of dark psychological suspense. Its setting, part of the Greek Peloponnese, has obsessed her since she read Patrick Leigh Fermor’s travel book The Mani in her twenties. Her previous thrillers include Lie with Me which was a Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller, and Sun Damage, which was subject to a fierce film and TV bidding war and is currently in production with Bad Wolf and Disney.

Before becoming a full time novelist, Sabine Durrant worked in editorial at The Independent, The Sunday Times and The Guardian where she also wrote the weekly ‘Sabine Durrant’ interview with subjects as diverse as Archbishop Runcie, Stella McCartney and Jeff Goldblum. She has written two works of general fiction, including the bestselling Having it and Eating it, and two Connie Pickles novels for young adults. Her essay ‘At Sea’, for the collection Truth or Dare, was a personal investigation into the life and death of her father, a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm, who disappeared off the Dorset coast a few months after she was born.

Sabine Durrant lives in south London with her husband, three adult children, one dog and two cats.