Review: The Good Ones - Polly Stewart

Review: The Good Ones - Polly Stewart - June 2023

I'll be upfront: I picked this one up on a quiet Sunday with the intention of just reading a chapter or two. A few hours later I surfaced, bleary-eyed and thoroughly unsettled. That should tell you everything you need to know about Polly Stewart's The Good Ones.

Twenty years ago, Nicola shared what sounds like a perfect, golden day at the lake with her closest friend Lauren,  a rare, child-free afternoon that felt like a gift. When Nicola declined to stay overnight and drove home to her mum, she had no idea it would be the last time she'd ever see her. The next morning she returned to find blood and no Lauren  and a town that eventually decided she'd simply walked away from her life. I found that part particularly chilling: that a woman can disappear and the community's answer is just to shrug and move on.

Nicola never bought the official story, but she also couldn't stay. The weight of small-town eyes on her back drove her out, and for twenty years she never looked back.  When Nicola returns to sell her late mother's house, the past doesn't just sidle up to her; it crashes back in with full force. Running into Lauren's former husband and daughter was uncomfortable enough, but then there's Sean Lauren's former brother-in-law, the man Nicola had that complicated, long-buried fling with. Now the school principal, naturally. Of course he is. Of course he is.

The temporary teaching job Sean offers feels both logical and absolutely loaded, and Stewart wrings every drop of tension from that arrangement. The threatening messages Nicola starts receiving once she begins poking at old wounds are genuinely menacing  not cartoonishly sinister, but the particular, quiet menace of someone who knows exactly where you live and wants you afraid.

If you love your thrillers atmospheric, your secrets buried deep, and your small towns dripping with judgment and memory, The Good Ones is absolutely your next read.

Amazon: https://amzn.to/3S9AlIV