Having read and enjoyed Secrets Between Us, I was thrilled to grab an ARC of The Housewife. Valerie excels at creating tense, character-driven stories, building atmosphere between them and making the reader want to race to the finish line. 

The Housewife is a prime example of excellent domestic noir, a slow-building, creeping sense that something isn't quite right. This is my favourite kind of thriller novel, the type that drip-feeds information, resulting in a knot in my stomach and a breathless need to know what was going on. The twist, when it came, was dark and shocking, and I held my breath until I reached the end.

The Housewife is the second of Keogh’s thrillers under the auspices of Bookouture. Secrets Between Us, my favourite thriller of 2018, her first. But this one is very different.

I don’t know if any of you are fans of Irish literature but there’s shades of that famous of all famous Irish playwrights, Seán O’Casey’s Kitchen-sink masterpiece, ‘Juno and the Paycock’, to be found amongst the pages of The Housewife. Keogh has taken a situation, a day in the life of a housewife and turned it inside-out and upside-down. After all there’s little to find that’s exciting in the day-to-day chores of washing, ironing, shopping and cleaning for a husband and small child – rewarding perhaps but exciting? No. But there’s something lurking, some element just out of the corner of the reader’s eye that is uncomfortable. Amongst the cooking and cleaning the husband is a little too controlling. The drive for Diane to be that impossible of all things – perfect – unsettling. And when she decides to try and get back into the workplace after a period of ill-health? Tragic.

There are no heroes between the pages of Keogh’s novel. There are no millionaires, yachts, blonde bombshells or other unrealistic characters. Here Keogh has made the ordinary extraordinary. The monotonous, riveting. Housework will never seem the same again and housewives? They each have a story to tell. 

More please.