where heroine Hannah remembers her mother's "red-brick railway worker's cottage" and the word "moribund" comes into her mind. Coincidentally, it's the word that comes into my mind nowadays when I read this sort of domestic gothic thriller. This genre has managed to endure without actually developing: its key ingredients – charming psychopaths, nice houses, anxieties about the limits of others' knowability – are the same as when Maggie O'Farrell catalysed the Daphne du Maurier revival some 15 years ago. O'Farrell knew when – and how – to move on, but left a vacuum which a host of inferior writers rushed to fill. The thing is, Whitehouse isn't inferior. She has real talent and potential which is constrained here by the empty demands of pastiche.