Title: The Friend
Author: Teresa Driscoll
Pages: 293
My rating: ☆☆☆☆☆
Release date: March 22, 2018

Thrillers come in all flavors: action thrillers, political thrillers, sci-fi thrillers, and on and on. A subgenre that relies more on intrigue and suspense than flash and bang, psychological thrillers are perhaps the hardest to pull off successfully. Yet Teresa Driscoll has crafted a suspense novel with just the right mix of external threats and internal conflict after an outsider arrives in a formerly sedate village in the British countryside and everything changes.

“The Friend” is told through alternating first person and third person points of view, a choice by the author that I found to be extremely effective, as we’re pulled into the narrator’s downward spiral into self-doubt, pain and trauma. Don’t want to divulge too much here because the slowly unfolding revelations and surprises are what makes the book special.

The main characters are crisply drawn, the writing first-rate, the dialogue realistic, the plot twists plausible. The kind of antisocial behavior the author brings to life in the antagonist is not the usual over-the-top excess but a restrained variety whose effect becomes even more frightening and powerful.

Don’t worry, there’s plenty of light to offset the darkness. I couldn’t help but smile at all the charming Britishisms – I actually used Kindle’s word definition to look up or confirm such terms as car boot (garage), twitcher (birdwatcher), rucksack (backpack), slowcoach (slowpoke) and many more.

Now, crack on and read “The Friend” for a thriller that’s more literary than potboiler.