📱The Strangers We Know 📱by Pip Drysdale #BookReview

When Charlie sees a man who is the spitting image of her husband Oliver on a dating app, her heart stops. Her first desperate instinct is to tell herself she must be mistaken – after all, she only caught a glimpse from a distance as her friends laughingly swiped through the men on offer. But no matter how much she tries to push her fears aside, she can’t let it go. Because she took that photo. On their honeymoon.

Suddenly other signs of betrayal start to add up and so Charlie does the only thing she can think of to defend her position – she signs up to the app to catch Oliver in the act.

But Charlie soon discovers that infidelity is the least of her problems. Nothing is as it seems and nobody is who she thinks they are …

 

The Strangers We Know turns out to be one of the most surprising novels this year. It starts off with a friend flicking through profiles on tinder in Charlie’s presence and it only takes a split second for Charlie to recognize her husband. What then you might think? Well, like any sane woman losing her mind probably, confirmation and confrontation are high up on Charlie’s agenda but from thereon the story only takes on very twisty developments. 

‘Who the hell did I marry?’ is a question Charlie Carter asks herself in the middle of the novel and I was also completely caught up in Charlie’s search for answers. What was Oliver playing at? Before she even has a chance to find out all the answers something happens that upped the mystery tenfold. 

I really liked Charlie, even with this lousy situation she’s in she made me smile, her reactions were precious, they were sometimes funny, sometimes logical or fierce but they always felt completely natural. I also loved how she would sometimes address the reader directly. We were on the in, her confidente, her friend.. this technique made me feel very close to her. She’s not some naïve woman, she’s a strong woman and a smart sleuth, and she gained a whole lot of knowledge from the movies (like us, right) and I loved all the small references she made of how it would go in a movie. I didn’t always agree with Charlie’s actions but she’s only human too, right, and without some stupid mistakes we’d never get such a page-turning book.

I had no idea how this story was going to play out, there were a lot of questions and no idea where to go to find the answers so I had no idea exactly how or who the bad guy/woman was. All I can say is that this novel is not at all a cliché story, it is refreshing and intriguing and quite unpredictable (and hearing this from me you know you can count on it being true!). When you finish reading and see where the story started and where it ended and what the motivation of it all turned out to be (it was definitely more than her husband simply looking for a booty call), well I can only admire the clever mind and resourcefulness of the author for incorporating such a deep-running backstory as this one in a seemingly everyday domestic scene of a man caught cheating red-handed.

I didn’t have Pip Drysdale on my radar before so this novel (this is her second book following debut novel The Sunday Girl) is the first one I read and she has definitely left me wanting to read more. I really love her style and her plot design and I’m very interested in finding out what else she has in store.

I received a free paperback copy of this novel from the publisher Simon & Schuster for review. This is still my honest opinion.

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