#BlogTour ‘The Woman Downstairs’ by Elisabeth Carpenter

About the book..

Can you ever really know your neighbours?

When human remains are found in a ground floor flat, the residents of Nelson Heights are shocked to learn that there was a dead body in their building for over three years.

Sarah lives at the flat above and after the remains are found, she feels threatened by a stranger hanging around the building.

Laura has lived in the building for as long as she can remember, caring for her elderly father, though there is more to her story than she is letting on.

As the investigation starts to heat up, and the two women become more involved, it’s clear that someone isn’t telling the truth about what went on all those years ago..

Huge thanks to Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Readers and Orion for my gifted ebook and blogtour invite for ‘The Woman Downstairs’ by Elisabeth Carpenter which is available now in paperback and ebook.

This book is a brilliant thriller, told in the present tense by narrators Sarah and Laura, who, at the beginning of the book do not know each other. The discovery of a body in their building is their point of connection, but this is a slow burn of a novel which keeps its cards very closely to its chest.

You need to pay attention and stay focussed when reading it as I found so many tiny, seemingly inconsequential details became really important later on, as you piece together exactly what could have happened.

It works on lots of levels, there is the nature of whether it was a murder or a natural death, this needs to be resolved for all concerned. There is the nature of social disengagement and the sad feeling of futility that the pace of modern life can allow a situation such as this to happen-the notion that a person can disappear for years and have no one notice, or care about them really affected me as I read.

The body is the trigger point for the story, yet as his or her story is reconstructed through the investigation into what happened in that flat, it metamorphosises into a conduit through which Sarah can tackle her academic block in her journalist studies, her ex-husband tries to use it as an excuse to get her back, and in Laura’s case, it is forcing her to face some rather unpleasant truths…

This story is very immediate, due to the use of the present tense, making it feel like it could happen to any of us, and the staccato sentences give us a very defined and narrow view of the block of flats where both women live- the concrete building becomes a coffin or a tomb for ambitions and a life well lived. The perception that outsiders have of what Sarah and Laura call home is immediate and dismissive, with the lack of community being blamed on the poverty of that area.

As Sarah and Laura go about being both haunted by this death and their own back stories, a more immediate threat is lurking in the shadows, who this is aimed at is very uncertain and Elisabeth skillfully twists and turns how the characters behave in order to keep the reader glued to the page and reading way past their bedtime…

I thoroughly enjoyed being kept turning page after page, even though my other half constantly complained how anto-social I was being (my kindle app is on my phone, and we have a no phones in the living room ban) , but my phone did not leave my side until the book was finished. I absolutely want to read more by this author and am excited to do so!

About the author…

Elisabeth (Libby) Carpenter won a Northern Writers New Fiction Award (2016) and was longlisted for Yeovil Literary Prize (2015 & 2016) and MsLexia Women’s Novel award (2015).

Elisabeth lives in Preston, Lancashire with her family. She loves the north of England, setting most of her stories in the area – including the novel she is writing at the moment.

99 Red Balloons was Elisabeth’s debut novel.

Links-https://elisabethcarpenter.co.uk/

https://www.compulsivereaders.com/

Twitter @LibbyCPT @Tr4cyF3nt0n @orionbooks