Kent’s novel contains the essential elements of a good psychological thriller: anticipation, fear, and a heroine to place your bets on.
Christobel Kent
Novel | 368 Pages | 5.5” x 8.2” | Reviewed: Paperback ARC
9781250117908 | First Reprint Edition | $16.00
Picador | New York City | BUY HERE
Christobel Kent’s The Crooked House contains the essential elements of a good psychological thriller: anticipation, fear, and a heroine to place your bets on. Alison, the sole survivor of a family annihilator, lives a quiet, reserved life in London. Now in her early thirties, she has taken on another name and lives hours away from the worst thing that ever happened to her as a young teen. At first, she’s not particularly compelling, but given her situation and gentle nature, it’s difficult not to become attached. Her handling of her trauma — avoidance at all costs — makes her so relatable that one cannot stop from caring for her, hoping for the best, yet knowing there’s more trauma to come.
For her entire life, she’d been led to believe it was her father who killed her mother and her three siblings one random night. Police, neighbors, and journalists all tell her she’s lucky her father didn’t know she was in the house at the time. For Alison, it’s impossible to reconcile the man who loved and nurtured her with the monster that ruined everything:
“If he’d known. If he’d known. What did they think? That he could hold a gun to her mother’s face … but not her?”
Paul, the boyfriend she’s not yet made up her mind about, invites Alison to attend a wedding with him. The catch? The wedding is being held in the same town she’s actively avoided for over a decade.
Lured back to the place of her family’s murder, she begins to ask questions that as a child she never thought to consider, and as a teenager she couldn’t bring herself to explore. Timidly facing her past, Alison endeavors to discover the truth of exactly what happened that terrible night in the small town that had always considered her family as outsiders.
The novel contends with questions of personal responsibility, the bystander effect, and inexplicable evil. The more Alison learns, the more it becomes clear people knew more than they let on. People knew and said nothing:
“Who else knew? Because in a place like this, it couldn’t stay hidden, knowledge like this ran underground like the roots of trees. Who else? Sometimes you couldn’t choose. Sometimes the bad thing came to get you.”
Kent’s writing style is sleek, elegant, and tight. She doesn’t mince words or go on and on with pastoral descriptions. She’s all about building plot and giving characters genuine voices. It works. Even the most hardened hearts can conjure sympathy for Alison, the quiet protagonist whose life has been about simply surviving since her family was murdered. While that may have been out of necessity, even Alison realizes the isolation has left her with almost no friends and with a fairly empty existence.
Kent by no means overwhelms the reader with examinations of morality; the novel is a psychological thriller at its core with a page-turning plot, but Alison’s journey is peppered with moments of ‘nobody said anything’ and ‘not our business.’ The novel serves as a reminder that people who stand by and say nothing, do nothing, still have culpability in the terrible things that take place on their watch.
If anything, the novel makes you think twice about moving to a quaint country town, where the promise of safety and “it couldn’t happen here” don’t ring true. Be careful whom you love, yes, but also be careful where you let that love take you.
CETORIA TOMBERLIN is a writer living in Northwest Georgia who received her bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing from Berry College. Her work has previously appeared in Fairy Tale Review, NonBinary Review, Southern Women’s Review, and Spires, and she is a book reviewer for Mixed Diversity Reads. Find her at her website.
