Is The Couple Next Door worth reading?

In The Couple Next Door, Anne and Marco Conti leave their sixth-month-old daughter, Cora, at home whilst they go next door for a dinner party. Armed with a monitor and regular visits at half-hour intervals, they assume Cora will be fine. But when they return, they discover the unthinkable has happened – somebody has taken Cora.

Anne and Marco understand their position looks bad – they left the child alone. The police find prescription medicine for Anne’s postpartum depression and find bad business reports for Marco Conti, making both parents suspects in the kidnapping of their own daughter.

Lapena maintains a sense of suspense in the novel, increasing the immediacy of the action.

Reaching the top of the Sunday Times Bestseller list, Shari Lapena’s The Couple Next Door was labelled ‘the new The Girl on the Train’ by i magazine. Lapena uses the kidnapping of the child to explore how far people are prepared to go to get what they want. Through the voice and theories of Detective Rasbach, she suggests that people are capable of anything and everything in certain situations.

The book had me hooked from the first few pages. The Couple Next Door swoops right into the middle of the action, half way through the dinner party on the fateful night, written in present tense. This tense is very apt as it fits the thriller genre – the reader witnesses the action unfolding at the same time the characters do. It maintains a sense of suspense in the novel, increasing the immediacy of the action.

Every character in the novel, from the protagonists to the neighbour Cynthia and Detective Rasbach, is so complex.

Lapena does a great job of developing the characters. Every character in the novel, from the protagonists to the neighbour Cynthia and Detective Rasbach, is so complex. Each character has been developed to be realistic and believable. The book is narrated in the third person, allowing the narrative to float seamlessly between the thoughts of each individual character. In a first-person narrative this story would have been limited to the thoughts of Anne or Marco Conti, but the third person allows the extensive character development of Cynthia, her husband Graham, both Anne and Marco, Anne’s parents, and Detective Rasbach.

The first half of The Couple Next Door contains several revelations, allowing you to believe that the kidnapper could be any of the characters. During the first two chapters, I thought that I had a firm idea of what I thought could have happened, but this quickly changed when something else was introduced to prove this wasn’t the case. In the first half of the book, I changed my mind almost every chapter because the plot was full of twists.

While the twist was fantastic, I was left quite disappointed with the outcome of the novel. 

In the middle of the book, the events of the night of Cora’s kidnapping is revealed, and you think you know exactly where the story is going. Initially, I was quite disappointed but I persevered because half the book was still unread. Based on the amount of twists in the first half of the novel, I thought something unexpected would be bound to happen in the last half. I was correct. For the next few chapters I thought I knew where it was going, but there was a big twist at the end which I would never have even considered. Yet the way it was explained meant I could also see this outcome being feasible.

I was left quite disappointed with the outcome of the novel. Whilst the twist was fantastic, I think the plotline should have been allowed to end there. Although hinting at a sequel, Lapena has admitted on her Good Reads Q&A that she has no plans to write a sequel to The Couple Next Door. It does further the answer to the question of what people are capable of, but seemed strange and out of place. In my opinion, it would have been much better if the novel had been left at the discovery of who kidnapped Cora as opposed to what actually happened at the end, which seemed unnecessary.

However, the true test of any good book is its readability, and it’s no exaggeration to say that I couldn’t put it down.