You might be paranoid, but that doesn’t mean they’re not watching you…
Adam lives a picture-perfect life: happy marriage, two young children, and a flourishing career as a doctor. But Adam also lives with a secret. Hospital CCTV, strangers' mobile phones, city traffic cameras – he is convinced that they are all watching him, recording his every move. All because of something terrible that happened at a drunken party when he was a student at Cambridge.
Only two other people knew what happened that night. Two people he's long left behind. Until one of them, Clio – Adam's great unrequited love – turns up on his doorstep, and reignites a sinister pact twenty-four years in the making...
It is such a pleasure to be hosting the blog tour for No Place to Hide today. Many thanks to J.S. Monroe, Head of Zeus and Sophie Ransom from Ransom PR for inviting me and for sending me a copy of the book.
No Place to Hide is the third book I've read by J.S. Monroe and while each has been very different, it's fair to say that they are all an unsettling exploration of contemporary life. As the tagline to the novel exhorts, 'You might be paranoid. But that doesn't mean they're not watching you.' Constant surveillance has become a regular theme in thrillers in recent years but nevertheless, this is an original and utterly chilling look at the darker side of technology – and of humanity itself...
The dual timeline follows Adam, as a first-year medic studying at Cambridge in 1998 and later as a successful consultant paediatrician. The older Adam is married and has two young children but it very quickly becomes obvious that he is constantly on edge and feels he is being watched. Although No Place to Hide is a slow-burner, the sense of foreboding is evident right from the start and I was immediately intrigued to know more. A frightening event in their local park results in Adam being reunited with Clio, whom he last saw at Cambridge, but while she seems delighted to see him again, it's clear that his reaction is less straightforward.
The present day scenes gradually depict a man losing control of his life but the clever switching between now and then soon makes the point that it was actually his actions in the past – and one night in particular – which brought him here. The gradual intensification of suspense is superbly compulsive, it's horribly obvious that Adam will make the wrong choices but fascinating to understand how and why he can be so manipulated. We are first introduced to the younger Adam shortly after he has played Doctor Faustus on stage, opposite Clio's Mephistopheles. As he is apparently befriended and drawn into the bohemian world of the louchely irresistible Louis, he ignores all the warnings and the resultant Faustian leitmotif which features throughout the novel is cleverly intertwined into the plot, becoming particularly terrifying as the significance of twenty-four year gap becomes impossible for him to ignore.
The first-person narrative of the past artfully conjures up the sordid yet irrevocably tempting world Adam enters; it's unequivocally awful and yet as we witness events through his eyes, it's clear to see how he ends up in this situation. Adam is the archetypal outsider; a first-generation medical student who spent his youth on fishing boats, he doesn't fit in at university and is later a disappointment to his father-in-law. This clash of worlds is almost imperceptible, given his success and yet evidently shapes everything he does, and when coupled with the guilt he feels about his past actions, J.S. Monroe brilliantly adds a chilling layer of doubt to proceedings – just what did Adam do?
The present-day chapters are told in the third-person which cleverly mimics the constant observation he is under, and as he realises the full, horrific truth, it feels almost as if we become complicit in events as we watch his life full apart. It's terrifying and as a study of human behaviour, only too believable; the voyeuristic tastes catered for by the dark web are shrewdly observed here but as our own reality shows increasingly give us the opportunity to determine other people's lives, it's perhaps also a cautionary tale as to what such power could eventually lead to.
No Place to Hide is a damning, perceptive exploration of humanity; temptation, revenge, fear and lust are examined alongside more insidious pressures, including class, media and money. It's a captivating combination of the most sinister elements of dark academia fiction and a disturbingly relevant look at where we may be headed. It's not a comforting read but kept me engrossed from start to finish and I thoroughly recommend it.
No Place to Hide is published by Aries (Head of Zeus) and can be purchased from bookshop.org, Hive, Waterstones, Kobo, Amazon but please support independent booksellers whenever possible.
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