Is there anything more delicious than a twisty read with a wholly unreliable narrator? If it’s done right then you’ll want to devour it in one sitting, and I’m here to tell you that Ruth Irons gets it absolutely spot-on with her debut offering, The Perfect Guest.
Blurb:
She stayed in your house. Now she wants your life . . .
We all have that friend – the one who doesn’t quite belong. Dinah Marshall is that person and knows it. After someone drops out, she’s invited to spend the weekend at a luxury holiday home with women she’s known since university. However, the gulf between them has widened since then, and Dinah is conscious of being the only one with no money, career, partner or children. Feeling like an outsider, she takes to snooping around the house.
She’s fascinated by its owners, Sarah and Isaac Rivers – and when she discovers she can secretly stay an extra night, that fascination quickly spirals into obsession. When Isaac Rivers meets ‘Diana Malone’ at an exclusive members club, he introduces her to his wife and friends, and she’s soon welcomed into the group.
She seems to be trying a little too hard, however, and as her somewhat intense behaviour starts to raise both eyebrows and questions, one of her new acquaintances begins to suspect she isn’t who she says she is.
For Diana – or is it Dinah? -this is a disaster: she’s worked hard to get where she has, and these suspicions threaten everything. But Diana isn’t the only one with secrets, and if she’s going down, then she might just take everyone else with her . . .
My Review:
Dinah Marshall is not living her best life. She’s living alone in a tiny, dingy apartment and working at a miserable job in a grungy cafe where her every move is reported back to her judgmental sister, Hen. When she’s invited along on a mini-break with some old university friends, she thinks, “why not?” After all, surely she deserves to enjoy herself and have some fun … doesn’t she?
Of course she’s fully aware that she no longer fits in with the group. Well, if she’s being honest, she never really did! The other women are all that combination of married, successful, comfortable and confident – everything that Dinah is not. As much as she wants to relax and enjoy herself, she can’t help feeling completely judged and inadequate, until she finds a way to undermine them and manages to sneak around the house at leisure without the others even knowing. And then she discovers she can remain in the house for another night after they’ve left and before the owners return. She’s quite proud of her ingenuity!
As Dinah contrives to meet Sarah and Isaac, the owners of the luxurious home that has captured her heart, she becomes increasingly obsessed with inveigling herself into their lives. And when she finally does meet them and their friends, it awakens a new hope in her. Perhaps the life that she craves is not as far out of reach as she thought it was – it might be for Dinah Marshall, but not for her brand new persona, Diana Malone!
And while her new friends might not exactly know ‘Diana’ as well as they think they do, they also aren’t the perfect people they appear to be. The more she gets to know them, the more she comes to realize that the magnetic, shiny veneer that attracted her to them in the first place might be a bit more tarnished up close than it looked from a distance.
Ruth Irons sets the tension and tone from the very first page, making this an unputdownable, unpredictable, roller-coaster ride of a psychological thriller. The main protagonists are not likeable people but one cannot help eagerly racing through this fast-paced read, to see where the plot is heading. And I have to admit, it certainly didn’t head in the direction that I was expecting!
And what is it about unlikeable characters that makes the reader (against their better judgment) quietly root for them? That is all down to the skill of the author and their ability to create multi-faceted characters. I’m looking forward to future reads from Ruth Irons!
Thank you to Compulsive Readers for another page-turning Blog Tour!
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