Linda works in a charity shop part time- the rest of the time she spends sorting her house out and tidying after her husband Terry. Occasional chapters take us to Linda in some sort of establishment where things are organized- we don’t quite know what- which gives it an eerie feel. They have not long moved into a different house and post arrives for a Rebecca- catalogues and such like which Linda opens and hence feels she is getting to know the elusive Rebecca. There have been some murders in the town of women and Linda along with her mother both feel that the police need some help from the public. Linda has previously been to the police station thinking she was helping but felt she was too easily dismissed. She wishes that the grass was greener and a little frustrated with her life but appears to know how to do anything to change it.
This is cleverly written and draws you in although you don’t really know why as Linda (the narrator) leads a very ordinary life but there's just that something hidden. Linda's mother made me cringe at times - having known people like this that really do exist sadly. Very much a character lead read that kept the pages turning as there was that air of mystery right the way through. A very cleverly thought out plot and a nice twist. One to keep you guessing right to the very end. Loved it.
(rest of links on publication)

So a graph of my enjoyment of this book would look like this:
Beginning: REALLY, REALLY high. In awe of this writing. The voice. The observation of detail. The humour (yes, it's a bit bleak at times but I thought some of it was funny in a way).
First chapters: still pretty high.
Then: waning, waning, waning as I found it too bleak and not enough was really happening to the lead character.
From just after the middle onwards: rising, rising, rising to the point where....
Nearing the end: I ended up being late cooking dinner as I had to finish it.

In summary, I LOVED the opening and I found the ending rather clever (though perhaps far-fetched). It's just a shame about the chapters in the first half where I found it a bit dull.

This is my favourite of all Joanna Cannons fiction. Hooked very early on by socially awkward Linda, and intriguing mysteries of her childhood coupled with a potential local murderer. This gets dark at times but also deftly funny… and it’s great crossover novel. A crime novel with several murders but with no blood and gore at all. A loner of a main character living in suburbia with her waste of space husband… and a glamorous couple who appear to have everything Linda ever wanted. It’s a great mix, a great story… and brilliant memorable characters in Linda.

Another beautifully written story by Joanna Cannon. This one is narrated by Linda, who leads a rather nondescript life, married to Terry and working part-time in a charity shop. Her life takes a significant turn when she starts receiving catalogues through the post for the former occupant of their house. But Linda is an unreliable narrator in more ways than one.
Linda's life is slowly and poignantly revealed. This is a story of loneliness, wanting to belong and about denial.
Joanna Cannon's observations on life and her character portrayals are excellent. The twists at the end of this book are outstanding and I loved this story.

3.5 stars


What a wonderfully awkward character Linda is.. I couldn't help but feel sorry for her sometimes.
Then at others despair that she was so oblivious.
An interesting story that I could never quite figure out where the threads would meet,and was pleasantly surprised when they all did,and the outcome.
An enjoyable way to spend a few hours.

A Disappointment: The challenge of characters, mostly dysfunctional, mostly unpleasant

I have absolutely adored Cannon’s first 2 books, which had warmth, humour, a lot of compassion and understanding and saw those with some kind of ‘mental health’ as individual, not formulaically dealt with, but seen as whole and unique. Cannon is/was a doctor, specialising in mental health.

This one seems very different, though there is still her hallmark humour – she always reminded me a little of Kate Atkinson in ‘Behind the Scenes At the Museum’ exuberance and vivid quirky colour, the strangeness and vibrance melded in her central characters.

Unfortunately with this one, something has gone awry, and I felt that this was definitely in the territory of psychological mental health-with-a-formulaic-twist-unreliable-narrator,

Part of the challenge is that her central character, Linda, is just not very appealing – a mixture of obsessive, self-obsessed, lacking completely in the ability to ‘read; or empathise with others, deeply boring. She has, of course, a history of ‘something terrible happened in her past’, often alluded to, and the reader can quickly guess what it is, so all the withheld information by the author, just seems a bit like manipulation. Linda’s mother is deeply critical, unloving, a gossipy woman. Everyone in Linda’s small suburban, lower middle/upper working class neighbourhood, seems similarly mean minded.

Linda works in a charity shop, and seems to bore her co-workers and customers. Her husband – well he ignores her, and so does she, him. He possibly has a secret which we are fairly keen we can guess. Or perhaps not. She’s an unreliable narrator, clearly, after all.

She forms an unlikely – well it can’t even be described as a friendship, with a somewhat dodgy couple.

I’m trying to avoid any possibility of spoiler, but given all the dropped hints, and withheld information dangled like not particularly interesting tit bits by the author, it is fairly obvious that either – what the reader is being led to think is the solution from the beginning, is the solution to this odd ‘thriller’ – or that there are going to be some massive twists – in which case, something else will be the solution.

The problem was – I really didn’t care, one way or another. This one seemed as if it were plot, not character, driven, Cannon was writing from the outside, rather than from within, and that all the tropes and cliches about those with mental health issues were being played out. No one occupying the pages for any length of time, seems to possess redeeming features.

This is a book of rather unpleasant people, small minded, small hearted, odd, but not in a way which really provokes the reader’s empathy or compassion.

A very very different reading experience from ‘Goats and Sheep’ or ‘Elsie’ I certainly felt as if I had been rooting around in a bin bag full of discarded, musty smelling rubbishy donations to a second hand or charity shop, with no interesting or redeemable finds at all!

This is Joanna Cannon’s best novel yet. It shows such insight into people’s minds and social behaviour, and at times is quite uncomfortable with the details of someone being socially inadequate. Linda is described in unflattering terms. None seems to care for her company, not even her husband, and she is constantly put down by her husband. We gradually learn the secrets of Linda’s childhood. Then Linda makes a new friend. The tension builds towards the end, and the twist took me by surprise. I highly recommend this excellent book.

i really enjoyed this book at the start but as i got further in i didn't enjoy it at all. i found the main character a bit needy and boring, and her husband was just awful.

I was really pleased to be given the opportunity to read an advance copy of this book, since I loved Joanna Cannon’s two others. This held its own well. It’s a very cleverly written story.

Linda is on the face of it not a very interesting character; she is living the kind of life that millions of people live day by day. Going to work, plodding along, cooking uninspired dinners and pushing the hoover around the house. There is no real communication, or any sense of a spark of connection between Linda and Terry, her husband.

There is plenty of black humour and characters who are all too familiar in this book. From Linda’s mother to nose-in-everything neighbour Malcolm. What happens after the girls on the estate go missing and turn up one by one is very well plotted. I don’t want to say anything more about it all, as I’d hate to spoil it for other readers.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read an ARC.

Linda and Terry have recently moved from one part of a large housing estate to a better part of the estate. When Linda opens some mail addressed to the previous occupant by accident she becomes obsessed with the person, Rebecca, who lived in their house before them. It's only a catalogue for furnishings but Linda feels that Rebecca's life is so much more glamorous than her own hum-drum life.

Alongside this is a possible serial killer preying on young women on the estate. Curtains are twitching, especially when police officers start knocking on doors.

This is a difficult book to "like", neither Linda or Terry have any redeeming qualities. Terry is a "lump", your stereotypical working class man. He goes to work, comes home expecting his egg and chips to be on the table ready for him then spends the evening glued to the TV.

Linda is the central character. Her mother has never shown her any love and is still a very dominant character in her life. She's lonely and openly admits to having a "small" life, hence her fixation with the mysterious Rebecca. Linda also has history of trying to insert herself in police investigations. What is very obvious throughout is that Linda is socially awkward, she finds it impossible to read situations or people. If anyone shows her any sympathy or attention Linda is convinced they are now best friends and will go out of her way to manufacture meetings. Linda is one of those characters that makes your skin itch.

The narrator of 'A Tidy Ending' is Linda, a quiet forty-something charity shop worker whose life is uneventful and monotonous. Linda is not good at making friends, and it's soon clear she lacks social skills. It's never clear whether Linda has some form of disability or neurological difference. The story moves between 'now' - where Linda is in a mental hospital - and a few months beforehand, when a body was discovered on the housing estate where she lives. Soon it becomes clear a serial killer is on the loose. Meanwhile Linda is becoming increasingly fascinated with the previous tenant of her house, a young woman whose post she sometimes receives. Is there any link with the murders?

Cannon's style is quite easy to read, and full of interesting observations and well written set pieces. I'm not sure whether writing in the first person worked well for this novel though. Linda's articulateness and sharp observational skills are at odds with her apparent total lack of social awareness. Several parts of the story are just odd and don't really make sense, and never get explained. There's also a good few plot holes that become apparent.

You expect some sort of twist in a novel like this, but the one we get isn't particularly surprising and doesn't entirely make sense either. Cannon does keep the readers guessing, but it's guessing between a fairly narrow range of possibilities. The story doesn't really ring true in lots of ways. I can't expand further without including spoilers, but we're talking about a significant number of issues - I'm not nitpicking over one or two minor things. I always give thrillers a bit of licence to stray away from the plausible, but there's a limit.

It's readable enough and quite well written in terms of the descriptions and observations, but the underlying plot and characterisation just doesn't hang well. You could pick any number of paragraphs to read in isolation and be impressed by what they say and how they say it. But the cohesive elements that turn a lot of individual small bits of good writing into a good novel, are lacking. It would probably appeal more to people who like literary fiction and observational writing, than readers who are more keen mysteries and thrillers.

Oh, this book was bad. Beyond trite and tedious. I can’t comprehend the glowing reviews 😩 Maybe I missed something 🙄
This follows old, boring bland Linda who loves to go into the mind-numblingly minutia of her boring, middle class life describing what she and her dull husband Terry have eaten. There’s a now and then narrative. We know something terrible has happened in the ‘now’ part and journalists are eager to speak to with Linda. In ‘Then’ we see Linda becoming obsessed with the disappearance of girls in her area, who look like each other and are later found dead. Suspicion falls on Terry, but Linda isn’t quite the reliable narrator.
~~~~~~~ spoilers ~~~~~~~~~~~







I think the twist at the end is supposed to be that Linda was the killer all along, which I found to be a meh twist. It’s been done so many times.
There wasn’t enough suspense and conflict to keep me engaged. I was frankly bored.

A cosy, intriguing suspense about Linda, a middle aged woman living with her husband Terry. They’re ordinary people, but their lives are upturned when women start disappearing in their area...
Linda is an unreliable narrator and you just don’t know what to expect. Despite its cosy vibes there are dark themes. An intriguing read about small-town English suburbia.

A great story with lots of twists, hooking from start to finish I would highly recommend this book to all who like a hook

This domestic thriller shows the allegedly boring and everyday life of a couple whose existence is seemingly grey and uneventful, that is until young women start disappearing in their area. This is the exact manifestation of the phrase “still waters run deep”! Creepy characters and a very good plot!

Absolutely adored this - Joanna’s writing is inviting and evocative and draws the reader along the path she has expertly crafted. Her characters are so memorable, so three-dimensional, and I feel I’ll be carrying Linda with me for quite some time. Another fabulous book by this talented author!

I absolutely loved this! What a fantastic plot, beautifully written, intertwining the relationships between the characters in such an ingenious and realistic way.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

A very clever psychological thriller about Linda, leading a seemingly old -fashioned, dull life with husband Terry, and a job in a charity shop. As the plot unfolds we learn more about her murky past, and her understated manipulative ways. The final plot twist is pure genius! I couldn't put it down.

I liked this book but I really didn’t like Linda! Joanna Cannon has created a memorable character and a creepy, disturbing story. Once you start, you won’t want to put it down until you see how everything unfolds. And then once you get to the very tidy ending, you will want to read it all over again with new eyes! Masterful!

A marvellously creepy and disturbing book! Linda looks to the world like a very dull, neurotic and boring woman, with an equally dull husband, but what goes on in Linda’s head, and also creeps into her actions at times, will have you holding your breath and reaching for something to calm your nerves as you wonder if you dare to turn the page! I had a feeling of deep unease all the way through this book, and the ending came as a complete shock. Joanna Cannon is a really excellent writer, with perfect pacing, strangely enticing characters and a great story to tell.