A wealthy couple ends up murdered in the nicest part of town in this compulsively readable, page-turning thriller from M. T. Edvardsson, The Woman Inside.

Bill Olsson, recently widowed, is desperate to provide for his daughter, Sally. Struggling to pay rent, he welcomes a lodger into their home: Karla, a law student and aspiring judge, who works as a housekeeper to make ends meet. Her clients are the Rytters, an incredibly wealthy couple who hide behind closed doors. The wife is ill and hasn’t left the house in months. The husband is controlling and obsessive. Is he just a worried husband, concerned for his wife’s health? Or is there something more sinister at play?

As Bill’s situation becomes more dire, Karla is forced to make a difficult choice. And when the Rytters wind up dead, and Karla is pulled in for questioning, she’s made to defend some parts of her past she’d rather not revisit.

Every person in The Woman Inside is hiding something, but could any of them really have been driven to kill?

Review:

Sophisticated, riveting, and suspenseful!

The Woman Inside is an ominous, character-driven thriller that takes you into the life of a handful of people, including Bill Olsson, an unemployed widower who will do whatever it takes to keep the roof over his daughter’s head but has an unfortunate addiction to gambling, and Karla Larsson, a young law student trying to live as frugally as possible while working a part-time job as a maid for some unusual clients and by renting just a single room in a stranger’s apartment.

The writing is tight and intense. The characters are complex, secretive, and distressed. And the plot, told using a mixture of narrative, police interviews, and alternating timelines, before-and-after the murders, is a sinister tale full of twists, turns, loneliness, insecurities, lies, obsession, manipulation, violence, infidelity, troubled pasts, and murder.

Overall, The Woman Inside is a tortuous, addictive, unnerving tale by Edvardsson that kept me guessing from the very first page and was deliciously relentless, surprising, deceptive, and bursting with misdirection.

This novel is available June 13, 2023.

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