The Perfect Neighbours by Rachel Sargeant

After a rather whirlwind romance and marriage Helen decides to give up her Head of P.E. post in England and join her husband, Gary, at the International School in Germany.  After all, his job comes with a house on Dickensweg and is part of a community of ex-pats who are all teachers at the same school as him.  A ready made community to slot in to - so what could go wrong.  It would seem that everything can go wrong and will.

This is a rather confused book that doesn't seem to know what it's characters are going to do next so just throws a lot of random information down for you to sift through.  I like a good thriller as much as the next person but just chucking out lots of seemingly random information on to the page and then scrabbling to draw it together at the end does not make it a twisty thriller, it makes it a disjointed one.  I can see that this is trying to evoke the Scandi-Noir genre but it has all the traits of that genre that make me dislike it so much.  Multiple story threads that are developing quite nicely (and in the case of Fiona very interestingly) but that are never so much resolved as dragged to a foregone conclusion before their time.

There are moments of good storytelling here and the isolation of being the "new girl" in an established community and trying to fit in whilst not becoming someone you are not is very well described. The one-upmanship of the existing residents and their very defined pecking order was well realised and convincing.  What let it down was the rather grisly ending that befell our Queen Bea and her guests - moderately shocking but falling flat in its execution.  The characters never really develop much past the one dimensional and I found that the only one I cared about was Fiona but the denouement of her real identity and what had happened to her was rather clumsy and rushed.

It was enjoyable enough and the pacing was fairly even, it just had more negatives than positives for me so could never be more than 3 stars - I did toy up with 2 but it was better than that (just).

**Review originally published February 2nd, 2018**