Happy publication day to Amanda Jennings for The Storm! A big thank you to HQ Stories for letting me read a proof through NetGalley. Before I give you my thoughts, here’s the blurb.

 

The Blurb

To the outside world Hannah married the perfect man. Behind the closed doors of their imposing home it’s a very different story. Nathan controls everything Hannah does. He chooses her clothes, checks her receipts, and keeps her passport locked away. But why does she let him?

Years before, in the midst of a relentless storm, the tragic events of one night changed everything. And Hannah has been living with the consequences ever since. Keeping Nathan happy. Doing as she’s told.

But the past is about to catch up with them.

Set against the unforgiving backdrop of a Cornish fishing port in the ‘90s, this is a devastating exploration of the power of coercive control in a marriage where nothing is quite as it seems…

 

My Review

I’ve read almost all of Amanda Jennings’ books and I can honestly say this is the best one yet. Quite frankly, it has everything you need for a fantastic story.

Hannah and Nathan seem the perfect couple. He’s a successful lawyer and she takes care of their large, imposing house and their fifteen-year-old son, Alex. Yet the house is more prison than home and Alex is pushing the boundaries Hannah has had to create to keep themselves safe from Nathan. But there’s only so long a house built on sand can survive.

There is so much more to this than just domestic noir. Not only is there a chilling and very realistic storyline of coercive control, there’s also a mystery to solve going back fifteen years. Using three viewpoints – Hannah, Nathan and Cameron – the story unfolds but not as you’d expect. I could feel Hannah’s trepidation whenever she had to confront Nathan and it was clear she had to choose her battles wisely. Nathan is twistier than a corkscrew. His chapters were very interesting as the reader gets to discover what lies behind Nathan’s hateful ways. Although I regularly wanted to scream at Hannah to get out of the marriage, she had her own reasons for staying. This is certainly not a glib look at coercive control but an insightful, authentic and heart-breaking story.

But as I wrote, there is also a mystery to solve and it’s in this part that Cornwall has the main role. Amanda Jennings’ excels in making the location of Cornwall an integral part of the book, as she has done with her past novels – The Cliff House and In Her Wake. It’s the life source of the sea that powers these chapters both with the living it provides to the fishermen and their families and the devastation it can cause. The sea takes as much as it gives. Although the title, The Storm, has more than one meaning here, there’s an actual storm that happens. These chapters were fantastic and I felt as though I was there, facing the storm, the tension rising with the waves.

I wish I could say more about the ending but I’m not going to give any spoilers away. I’ll just say that Amanda Jennings has been very clever and leave it at that. An outstanding book and one that will definitely be in my top ten reads of 2020.

 

You can buy The Storm here.

Or consider buying or ordering it from an independent bookshop. Maybe one in Cornwall!

 

The Author

Amanda Jennings writes psychological suspense and is the author of Sworn Secret,  The Judas Scar, In Her Wake, The Cliff House and now, The Storm. It’s set in Cornwall, where her mother’s side of the family is from, and where she spent long and very happy childhood summers. Amanda is a regular guest on BBC Berkshire’s weekly Book Club and enjoys meeting readers at libraries, book clubs and literary festivals. She writes a blog and is active on Twitter. She lives just outside Henley-on-Thames with her husband, three daughters and an unruly menagerie of pets.