The Bad Neighbour

The Bad Neighbour is due out on 23 May 2023 in paperback and e-book.

Publisher: Hobeck Books
Genre: psychological suspense, cosy mystery, thriller

Paperback
ISBN: 9781915817105
Price: £10.99

Plot in a sentence

Lockdown, 2020: Two women suspect their mutual neighbour is hiding a horrific secret… and they may be in grave danger.

Description

In March 2020, the Covid pandemic hits the sleepy English village of Brampton. At the start of lockdown, local busybody and social climber Tara Sanderson sets up a community group to help vulnerable residents through the crisis. Elderly Elspeth Chambers, her longstanding neighbour and friend, accepts Tara’s offer to buy food and collect medicine for her.

But it isn’t long before neighbourliness and community spirit turn sour. Tensions arise when Tara becomes jealous of Elspeth’s emerging friendship with Ashley Kahn, a recent arrival in Wilton Close. Suspecting there is more to Tara’s hostility toward them than meets the eye, Ashley and Elspeth start to uncover their neighbour’s long-buried secrets…

Inspiration and themes

The Bad Neighbour is a cosy crime-influenced psychological thriller. Set in an English village from the start of the first lockdown, the book is centred on the relationships between three women who are neighbours. One of them sets up a group to help the vulnerable, but it all goes horribly wrong…

My book was inspired by my own and friends’ experiences of living through the first lockdown of 2020. I wanted to explore aspects of this time, such as social isolation and disconnection, Zoom meetings gone awry, communal efforts to help those ‘shielding’ alongside increasing community division, lockdown rule-breaking, the Black Lives Matter movement, and bullying and public shaming via social media. Themes in the book include the impact of the pandemic on a small community and the importance of female friendship in overcoming adversity.