A Tidy Ending by Joanna Cannon

A TIDY ENDING is the latest adult novel from Joanna Cannon. Like her earlier works, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep or Three Things about Elsie, there is a strong element of suspense and lurking danger. Police suspect that a serial killer may be attacking young women in a suburban English town where Linda Hammett and her husband Terry live. Linda clearly struggles with social contact; for example, there is a memorable scene on the tube where she tries to converse with other passengers who quickly change cars. An unreliable narrator, she is obsessed with music and cleaning and is somewhat reminiscent of Molly Graves in Nita Prose’s The Maid. A big difference is that Molly generally had good intentions and readily shared a naïve stream of consciousness, but Cannon lets her reader brood about Linda‘s possible thoughts and actions, labeling chapters as Now (with Linda in an institution) whereas other chapters are a flashback to during the time of the investigation with Linda stalking the former tenant of her council house. Like Cannon’s other well-written books, the pace is slow (readers need patience to fully enjoy her work) and then accelerates towards a rather shocking finale. A TIDY ENDING received a starred review from Booklist and Publishers Weekly.