Because She Loves Me – Mark Edwards

Psychological Thriller
4*’s

I was a huge fan of The Magpies and so I was delighted to hear that Mark Edwards had written another psychological thriller.

Andrew is being treated for a serious eye condition at the famous Moorfield’s Hospital when he meets Charlie, a stunning red-head, with a sense of humour to match his and is someone who isn’t afraid to stand-up for herself. Andrew is smitten but then everything in his life appears to go in a downward spiral.

This is an incredibly hard book to review because Mark Edwards is a master at introducing the unexpected and I don’t want to reveal anything that will spoil the story for others so suffice to say some seriously scary stuff happens.

The story is told from Andrew’s perspective but with enough detail given about the rest of the cast of characters that they too become realistic people from his sister Tilly, disabled in a car accident to his Albanian cleaner Krissi who does little in the way of actual cleaning. The emotions Andrew feels are not over-dramatised but rather reflect the confusion he feels about what is happening around him, only rising to a higher level when events escalate leaving him in no doubt that something sinister is going on. The only downside to the story being wholly narrated by Andrew is that in the early part of the book his feelings for Charlie, Tilly and best-friend Sasha are overly laboured and dissected, I’m not a big fan of monologues ruminating on the nature of various nature of relationships which tend to feel a little bit ‘staged.’

This book is about obsession and jealousy, twinned emotions which makes any relationship between the best-matched couples difficult to balance but makes for a great subject for a psychological novel and one that most of us have had some brushes with in life, either our own or those close to us and in the letter from the author he explains that he has first-hand knowledge of the difficulty of dealing with this particular emotion. This book definitely has more than a hint of Fatal Attraction, but you will be relieved to hear minus the bunny.

A cracking good read and best read in as few sessions as possible to get the full force of the screws in the tension meter being tightened.

I’d like to thank Amazon Publishers for allowing me to read a copy of this book in return for this honest review. Because She Loves Me was published on 2 September and at the time of writing this review is #1 Best Seller in Psychological Thrillers.