Hooked on thrillers

I should add that it’s not all Proust and Woolf in my reading nook. During lockdown, I developed a serious addiction to psychological thrillers and am now up to about three a week. Among their most popular themes – your husband isn’t who you think he is, your daughter’s got a secret drug habit, the next-door neighbour’s a serial killer – perhaps the most abiding is house anxiety. Protagonists are forever moving into homes they can’t really afford, or where a dreadful crime has been committed unbeknown to them, or where there’s a clandestine surveillance system, and sometimes all three.

Often, there is a neighbourhood queen bee whose shiny kitchen cabinets mark her out as a villain. By their fiction shall you know their most deeply rooted fears.