Title: How Can I Help You

Author: Laura Sims

Genre: Thriller

Publisher: Verve Books

Publication Date: 25th July 2024

Rating: 5/5

Cover:

Summary:

No one knows Margo’s real name. Her colleagues and patrons at a small-town public library only know her middle-aged normalcy, congeniality and charm. They have no reason to suspect that she is, in fact, a former nurse with a trail of countless premature deaths in her wake. She has turned a new page, so to speak, and the library is her sanctuary, a place to quell old urges.

That is, at least, until Patricia, a recent graduate and failed novelist, joins the library staff. Patricia quickly notices Margo’s subtly sinister edge and watches her carefully. When a patron’s death in the library bathroom offers a hint of Margo’s mysterious past, Patricia can’t resist digging deeper – even as this new fixation becomes all-consuming.

Taut and compelling, How Can I Help You explores the dark side of human nature and the dangerous pull of artistic obsession.

Review:

How Can I Help You had me hooked from the start and didn’t let up until the last line. It is a fabulously dark and unsettling pas de deux between two librarians, Margo and Patricia. It is a masterclass in atmospheric tension and is razor sharp in the way it ratchets up the pressure until the climax. Margo is one of the most unnerving characters I’ve read about in ages, she is genuinely quite alarming with her strange obsessions and her reminiscing on her previous life and persona as a nurse who clearly took matters into her own hands with her unfortunate patients. Patricia is a fascinating counterpart, both unsettled by and yet compulsively fixated with Margo’s oddities.

The narrative switches back and forth between Margo and Patricia which works beautifully in this context, giving the reader two different interpretations and reactions to the same events. How Can I Help You is a short book but it packs a serious punch and is paced perfectly in a way that makes you unable to look away for even a second. Disquieting, sharp and deliciously intense – I highly recommend picking up this electrifying little book.

★★★★★

Thank you so much to Sarah for inviting me on this tour and organising it. I kindly received a copy of the book from the publisher. My review is entirely my own honest opinion.

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