ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – The Other Couple by Sarah J. Naughton @SarahJNaughton @TrapezeBooks #BlogTour
I’m over the moon to be kicking off the blog tour for The Other Couple by Sarah J. Naughton today. I loved this book! My thanks to Tracy Fenton for the place on the tour and Sam Eades from Trapeze Books for the review copy.
If you’d like to read my review of Sarah’s last book, Tattletale, then you can do so here.
It was meant to be the perfect honeymoon.
A five-star resort in paradise.
White sands, a private villa and world-class cuisine.
A chance for newlyweds Asha and Ollie Graveney to recover from a recent tragedy, and enjoy the holiday of their dreams.
Except someone has other plans…
And paradise has turned into a nightmare.
I loved Sarah J Naughton’s previous book, Tattletale, but The Other Couple…….wow! This book is amazing. With this one, Naughton has, in my opinion, cemented her place in the psychological thriller hall of fame.
Asha is a Londoner who grew up without any particular privileges and had to work hard to get where she is. She works as a journalist and her work brings her into contact with Ollie Graveney, the man she will marry. He’s very upper crust, very rich and completely different to Asha but they fall in love and have a lavish wedding and a very lavish honeymoon in an exclusive Vietnamese resort.
Vietnam is where the book starts with Asha in hospital with no memory of what has happened to put her there. From there the book flits around a lot between the hospital, the wedding and the honeymoon. A certain amount of concentration is required to keep up but if you can you will be rewarded by an incredibly twisty and well-plotted story.
From the beginning of the honeymoon there is a strong sense, both for Asha and for me as the reader, that something isn’t right. Ollie is behaving out of character and Asha keeps seeing things that put the wind up her. To be honest, it started to put the wind up me too, especially when I was reading at night. It’s all a bit sinister and a bit scary at times.
The other guests at the resort all fell under suspicion for me. David and Sophie are the people who seem to be on the same wavelength as Ollie but is all as it seems with them? What about the Mulgraves – Travis and Caspar? Their relationship seems unconventional, but is there more to them than meets the eye? And then there’s Sean, who is on his own and doesn’t seem to quite fit into the opulence of the resort. The big strength of this story is the unknown, the sense of foreboding and that something is afoot. The plotting and the eventual unfolding of the truth is brilliant.
I liked Asha a lot. She’s gutsy, sharp, brave and clever. She’s a really great creation. It was difficult to know who else to like as I didn’t trust most of the other characters, but all are well-drawn.
The Other Couple is the perfect thriller. It’s tense, exciting and made me say “oh my God” to myself as I was reading. I thought it was absolutely fantastic and a complete page turner. Thrilling stuff indeed.
Sarah J Naughton was born in 1975 and grew up in Dorset. She studied English Literature at UCL and has been in London ever since, spending ten years as a copywriter in an advertising agency before giving up to have children.
She was shortlisted for The Costa Children’s Book Award for her novel, The Hanged Man Rises, and now writes psychological fiction for adults.
She lives with her husband and two sons.
