The Body Next Door

I flew through The Body Next Door, completing it two days. I started it on the plane to Germany, after my in-flight reading of Passenger to Frankfurt, and finished in the weird jetlagged morning.

The Body Next Door is a suspense thriller that opens with, well, a body discovered next door to luxury vacation home. Construction has unearthed the body of an unknown young woman, right next to the wealthy McCulloughs’ vacation getaway on Orcas Island. I loved how the unearthed body represented all the buried secrets on the island, bringing up all the history, secrets and connections that different people needed to keep hidden.

Rich husband Allan McCullough and his young trophy wife Hannah, and their two children seem to all have a perfect life, with Allan as such an Obvious Bad Guy that I looked forward to him getting his terrible comeuppance and I knew — with my thriller-reader spidersense — that there had to be more to the story. From the start, Hannah seems to so deeply dislike the island, so why do they even have a vacation home there? And she seems to know a lot about a place where she doesn’t like to spend time. 

There are multiple perspectives and timelines in The Body Next Door, which is confusing and disorienting at first (and a few times later in the book, to be honest). I don’t love when thrillers jump to an unrelated storyline with an unrelated character, this feels more like a commercial interrupting the real program. Especially when the narrative leaves the island and picks up with a violinist with an eating disorder. It takes a long time for the payoff for the jumping, but it’s worth it for the amazing wrap up, with a bizarre but lovely found-family at the end.  This is an element I love in fiction, but we don’t often get  in a suspense story, so I especially enjoyed the way everything finished. What I’m saying is, just roll with the jarring narrative jumps in the beginning for a satisfying conclusion. 

Readers already know in a dual-timeline thriller some of the characters are going to overlap, and sorting out who is who, and what their connections are to the cult storyline, is a large part of the mystery.  The Orcas Island cult uses nicknames like Kestral and Littlest, which felt believable for their community, and avoided the usual nickname-fakeout (you know the nickname-fakeout, right? It’s a thriller where sweet Liz was actually evil Betsy this whole time!). One of the stories has a child narrator, so even though my thriller-reader sense told me that the unnamed mother was going to return, I didn’t guess how.  As we see more of the cult, the Allan’s marriage, and the distant storyline with the Stradivarius violin, the book also raises thoughtful questions about control and safety through all the storylines. 

The Body Next Door has a supernatural aspect, which I really loved, but you do have to be in the mood for the unexplained.  It’s easy for an ability to become too powerful and start to work as a get-out-of-plot-free card, automatically rescuing our heroes from danger. Here, though, it added to the sense of mystery and to the feeling that this story was happening on the fringes of the visible world.  Other elements of the story had that feel too, with the parental neglect of the cult-y community, an older man with an underage wife, a crush that’s more of an obsession, etc. There was an overall feel that the shadowy mysteries of the book were happening in the semi-visible margins of our everyday world. 

Anyway, that’s about all I can say about the atmosphere without revealing plot events that would be spoilers, and this is such a layered and twisty story, you’d really want to discover each new development at the author’s pace.