Before We Met by Lucie Whitehouse review

Hannah is 33, resolutely single, enjoying her life in New York and her career in advertising, when she meets fellow Brit Mark and is swept off her feet. Fast forward a year and they are married and back in London, Hannah unemployed and dispirited, as Mark's business goes from strength to strength. Hannah is waiting at Heathrow one dark and stormy night for her husband to fly in from the US; he never arrives and she starts to realise just how little she knows about this man.

He calls her, has a series of plausible reasons for his absence, but something niggles at Hannah, a "strange itchy feeling, as if she'd put on a rough wool jumper next to her skin". Mark's assistant, Neesha, thought he was in Rome, on a romantic weekend with his wife of less than eight months; then Hannah finds her bank account has been emptied. The more she investigates, the more her life begins to unravel until she doesn't know what is truth or lie, deceit or kindness.

Lucie Whitehouse's third novel sits in the niche made popular by Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl and SJ Watson's Before I Go to Sleep: it's a "marriage thriller", in which Whitehouse explores the widening cracks in a relationship, and how well two people can really know each other. But unlike Flynn and Watson, Whitehouse takes a while to get going: the first part of the novel is too stuffed with flashbacks, and with space-filling specifics about the couple's Important Proper Jobs. We hear a lot about DataPro, the company Mark has been running since he was 23, "one of the most sophisticated corporate software design companies in Europe", and Hannah's adverts: "Well, the Grain Brothers are pleased – they're shifting 12 times as much Harvest Bite as usual…"

Characters, particularly the more minor ones, are not fleshed out, and Whitehouse is prone to throwing in self-conscious details in an attempt to make her creations more three-dimensional; Hannah's fondness for Walt Whitman and Graham Greene, for example, feels extraneous.

But despite its flaws, once Before We Met hits its stride, it turns into a creepily effective thriller, Whitehouse ramping up the chills with her dark wintry weather and her glimpses into the creation of a disturbed mind. Hannah flounders, lost in the murk of lies, as she slowly begins to realise the danger she is in. Returning home after discovering the sand on which her marriage is built, "the stairs climbed away into a soupy gloom, and she had the idea that the place was withdrawing from her, taking sides".

Later, as Hannah wakes from a troubled sleep, she finds "she's dreamed, strange scraps of stories connected by a single common thread: the knowledge that she'd forgotten something vitally important". Whitehouse displays her skill as a writer when she portrays Hannah's growing fear, the "single sharp throb in her stomach", the room that "start[s] to ebb and flow around her, the carpet undulating under her feet". And she marshals her creations to an enjoyably nail-biting, spine-tingling denouement; if only she'd cracked on with the thrills a little earlier.

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