Book Review: Behind A Closed Door by JD Barker

Verity Partington
Verity’s Book Nook
2 min readMay 17, 2024

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A cautionary tale about tech from the much-lauded thriller author.

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

When I saw a new book by JD Barker pop up in my Netgalley feed, I immediately pressed the button to request it. He co-wrote The Noise with James Patterson and is one of the hosts of a great podcast called Writers’ Ink, so I knew I would be in good hands.

And that certainly proved to be the case, although Behind A Closed Door is much different to his usual work.

In this book we follow a married couple named Abby and Brendan, whose love life has gone a little stale. When they visit a therapist and she recommends an app to spice things up a bit, they decide it can’t hurt to give it a try. Can it?

Since this is a thriller the answer is obviously yes, and Abby and Brendan find themselves being lured into doing ever-more daring things for the sake of racking up points on the app.

But when those things cross from risqué to downright dangerous — and the app seems to take on a mind of its own with the information it can mine from their smartphones — Abby and Brendan find it isn’t just their marriage that’s at stake… it could be their lives, too.

I enjoyed this book a lot, particularly the ‘what if’ scenarios that could easily crop up in real life due to the huge amounts of data we…

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Verity Partington
Verity’s Book Nook

A writer and author of crime thrillers living in the UK. Partial to books, stationery, papercrafts and walking. You can find her books on Amazon here: https://a