Review: ‘White Bodies’, by Jane Robins

Published By: HQ

Publication Date: 28th December 2017

I.S.B.N.: 9780008217549

Format: Hardback

Price: £12.99

Blurb

Felix and Tilda seem like the perfect couple: young and in love, a financier and a beautiful up-and-coming starlet. But behind their flawless façade, not everything is as it seems.

Callie, Tilda’s unassuming twin, has watched her sister visibly shrink under Felix’s domineering love. She has looked on silently as Tilda stopped working, nearly stopped eating, and turned into a neat freak, with mugs wrapped in clingfilm and suspicious syringes hidden in the bathroom rubbish. She knows about Felix’s uncontrollable rages, and has seen the bruises on the white skin of her sister’s arms.

Worried about the psychological hold that Felix seems to have over Tilda, Callie joins an internet support group for victims of abuse and their friends. However, things spiral out of control and she starts to doubt her own judgement when one of her new acquaintances is killed by an abusive man. And then suddenly Felix dies—or was he murdered?

Received from the publisher in return for an honest review

My Review

Oh my goodness, I’m drained from reading this book. It’s so intense and gripping, I couldn’t put it down. 

Tilda is a rising starlet, Callie works in a bookshop three days a week. They are twins, psychologically entwined from a young age. When Tilda meets Felix, a Swedish-American hedge-fund manager with severe OCD, Callie is drawn into an obsession with Tilda’s safety.

When a ‘friend’, Scarlet, from a domestic abuse website draws her into a plan to kill both Felix and an unknown man who is abusing her online friend, based on Hitchcock’s ‘Strangers on a Train’. Callie is confused, and doesn’t want to get involved and yet obsessed with her belief that Felix is abusing Tilda.

Oh, there’s so many complications, as Callie works out the truth, which is ever changing. Her developing relationship with Wilf helps to stabilise Callie, and a meeting with an old school friend, and now a psychiatrist, Tilda’s psychiatrist, Liam finally gives her some perspective. The story unfolds from Callie’s view point, giving us a limited impression of events unless she speaks to other people. It’s very effecting and as I’ve previously mentioned, very intense.

A must for the lover of psychological thriller.

4/5