A woman wakes up in the middle of the night. “There was someone in the house.” She’s imagining it, she tells herself. But then she sees him – a man, tall, with “the distantly familiar rancidness of something wrong and rotten she’d tasted before and couldn’t quite place”. As he moves through her dark home, she realises she has seconds to decide what to do: pretend to be asleep, run, or wake her children and hide them away. “‘We have to be quiet,’ she whispered. ‘We have to be quiet! If we’re not quiet the monster will get us!’”
Nightwatching (Viking) by Tracy Sierra plays on old fears and nightmares to create one of the most terrifying – and brilliant – thrillers I have ever read. It had me waking at night after swirling bad dreams, and I keep going back to it in my mind, picking over the scenarios in which Sierra places her brave, capable protagonist. Gripping from start to finish, with an antagonist to leave you trembling in your bedroom at night, it’s hard to believe this is a first novel, and I can’t recommend it more highly.
