The Girl Before.

Imagine if you had a chance to live in a beautifully designed home in a cool London neighbourhood and only had to pay a fraction of what such a house normally rents for. Would you be tempted? Of course you would.

How about if you had to pass a stringent series of interviews to gain occupancy? How about if the house is an experimental piece of technology that senses where you are and what you are doing? Or even, how about the house anticipating your behaviour and understanding your thought patterns? It's beginning to sound less appealing right?

And then you find out that the previous tenant had died inside the house in mysterious circumstances? Would you still be tempted? Maybe not...

Well that's the premise of The Girl Before. 

Nicola is looking for a new start and is delighted to have been selected to live in such a fabulous house, however, not long after she moves in strange things start to happen inside the house. At first she puts it down to blips in the house's sophisticated tech systems but then things start to occur that appear to be both menacing and personal. When Nicola finds out about the death of Emma, the houses previous occupant, she starts investigating and things become even stranger and more frightening.

The Girl Before is a fast read told in a series of short chapters alternately narrated by Emma and Nicola. While I did enjoy the book, finding myself eager to pick it up to find out what happened next I was at odds with a large part of it. 

It's a tale centered on two women, written by a man, and large parts of it simply didn't reflect how a woman would behave or react. There were some truly cringe making sex scenes that were both unnecessary and very badly written, I'm also still pondering why Nicola, who casually threw on Prada dresses, needed subsidised rent!

Bad sex and unlikely female behaviour aside this is an intriguingly plotted thriller that progresses quickly. There's a sense of unease throughout the book and a twist in the ending that I wasn't expecting but the author and editors needed to pay more attention to how real women act and feel to make the story more credible.