Book Review: You Let Me In by Lucy Clarke.

Product details:
Publisher: HarperCollins.
Hardcover 416 pages.
Release date: September 6th 2018.
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Source: Received from publisher for review.

Spine-tingling, chilling, and utterly compulsive, YOU LET ME IN is the stunning new novel from Richard & Judy Book Club author, Lucy ClarkeNothing has felt right since Elle rented out her house . . .

I’M IN YOUR HOUSEThere’s a new coldness. A shift in the atmosphere. The prickling feeling that someone is watching her every move from the shadows.

I’M IN YOUR HEADMaybe it’s all in Elle’s mind? She’s a writer – her imagination, after all, is her strength. And yet every threat seems personal. As if someone has discovered the secrets that keep her awake at night.

AND NOW I KNOW YOUR SECRETAs fear and paranoia close in, Elle’s own home becomes a prison. Someone is unlocking her past – and she’s given them the key…

Thinking of renting out your home on Airbnb? You might think again when you read You Let Me In by Lucy Clarke...

With her debut novel, Wild Fear, author Elle Fielding enjoyed the kind of runaway success most writers can only dream of.   Wild Fear made all of Elle’s dreams come true, affording her the life she always wanted, including her dream home, a beautiful old house on the Cornish coast. The thing about dream homes is that they don’t come cheap; Elle has spent most of the six-figure advance she received for her second novel renovating her home to perfection. Now, the money is gone and with the deadline for her highly-anticipated sophomore novel looming, Elle is starting to panic. The problem is, Elle’s work in progress is currently nothing more than a masterclass in procrastination. Elle might have been living a whirlwind life of festivals, signings and talks while meeting her adoring fans, but what she hasn’t been doing is a whole lot of writing. 

What’s a girl to do when her advance is gone and she’s behind on her mortgage repayments? Why, let a bunch of paying strangers live in her house for a few weeks, of course!

This sharing economy we live in today is all well and good – if you don’t think about it too deeply or too often. The thing about You Let Me In is that it makes you think about this stuff; this book makes you think about posting your personal information online (as Elle does – along with the rest of us), it makes you think about all the people that sign up to Airbnb and hand over their house keys to complete strangers without a second thought. When you think about it, it’s totally insane that we do this stuff! After all, there’s nothing to stop those strangers getting your keys copied. There’s nothing to stop them using those keys to sneak into you’re your house late at night...Eeek! 

However, when Elle returns from her trip, it seems that any fears she had about letting strangers stay in her house were unfounded. Apart from a few kids toys left lying around, Elle’s house is just as she left it: pristine.  Elle is pretty house proud, just FYI.  The thing is, though everything seems to have gone well, Elle appears to be troubled. She can’t sleep on her first night back. And she feels uneasy, almost as if someone is watching her...Then there’s the shard of glass on Elle’s bedroom floor; the shard of glass -  placed right in front of her floor-length mirror - that pierced her foot. There’s that uneasy feeling again. There’s something strange about the placement of that shard of glass. It’s almost as if it was staged – almost as if it was put there on purpose to hurt Elle. But who would want to hurt Elle? After all, Elle has never hurt anybody. Or has she?

As things go from bad to worse and Elle’s dream life turns into the stuff of nightmares, it soon becomes clear that a blank word document and a dwindling bank account are not the only things Elle has been keeping secret from the people in her life. 

 Tense, tightly-plotted and highly original, You Let Me In wins in terms of shocks and surprises, twists and thrillers. In short, it has everything I want in a thriller. A winner! 

P.S: Enter to WIN a copy of YOU LET ME IN.