Disclaimer: The astonishing Sunday Times No.1 Bestseller, perfect for fans of Anatomy of a Scandal

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These standard openers have been done to death, so to speak, to the point where you’d be crazy to read a mystery or thriller that uses one. Whilst clearing out his wife’s belongings he comes across a novel she has written about the circumstances surrounding their son’s death at the age of nineteen. A faultlessly constructed, page-turning debut, Disclaimer delivers its twists and surprises with ease.

They have one grown son, Nicholas, who has not quite lived up the expectations they wanted for him; but he has moved out and is living an independent life. Disclaimer was my first step into the entirely unventured-before world of fictitious psychlogical thrillers (for me).I can tell you that our chief protagonist, Catherine Ravenscroft has just moved house to a new apartment with her husband Robert when she comes across a novel. It threatens to expose a secret from her past, one she thought hidden for all time, the consequences which could topple her very existence.

The extraordinarily slow pace after the blue touch paper moment of Catherine Ravenscroft discovering herself between the pages of a novel leads to a fairly ponderous recounting before Knight even considers the repercussions that it will have. Well as with any book that depends on the reader not knowing very much before they start to appreciate the story, I can’t tell you very much! What it amounts to is that my normal existence as a reader happily reading and loving the bestsellers is now marked by moments of self-doubt and slight bewilderment. The story goes back and forth in time, to when Catherine was a young women, recently married and when Stephen was a teacher. With a couple of reservations, I found Disclaimer by Renée Knight to be well written, engrossing and quite chilling.

Her husband and son seem like strangers, her job fades into insignificance and her aging mother is in the early stages of dementia.

Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.

If it was not for the excellent production and the voices of the two actors relating this story from Catherine's and Stephen's point of view, I would not have got to the end of this book. And then there's the central conflict of the story, which is the secret hidden away in the pages of the mystery book and that is, supposedly, earth-shattering and utterly terrible. The overly long tidying up of matters which Knight opts for following the powerful denouement are an unnecessary detraction from a story which charts the unhappy lives of two very different families.