I listened to A Tidy Ending by Joanna Cannon in August having been recommended it by a friend and was instantly pulled into the world of quirky narrator Linda. Linda is not like other people – she doesn’t read social queues, struggles to make friends, has a nightmare of a mother and a husband she is deeply disappointed in. She lives on a suburban Close and works in a charity shop and believes what she has always been told – that she is unattractive and unremarkable.

Her life gets suddenly more exciting when a series of murders begin and she becomes fascinated with Rebecca Finch, the woman who used to live in her house, whose post she keeps receiving. She sets out to find and befriend the woman and decides to embark on a makeover of herself, just as her husband Terry seems to be acting more and more suspiciously.

When the murders get closer and closer to home it seems inevitable that Terry is somehow involved, although Linda doesn’t see who the clues are pointing to, and it becomes clear that she is now an inpatient in a mental health facility, unless it is some else she is visiting that explains her presence there. The ending was pretty clear to me, but unlike its title, deliberately leaves it untidy for you to make your own mind up about who the killer is.