No Place to Hide by J.S. Monroe
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 medical student.
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…
No Place to Hide is a spellbinding tale of psychological suspense, weaving together the dark web, murder, and blackmail…
My Review
What a page-turner this became. Slowly setting the scene in two timelines – Adam’s life as a medical student at Cambridge in 1998, and today as a paediatrician, married with two lovely children. The perfect life? It should be, but it’s all based on a lie. Because when Adam was at university, he was obsessed with an arts student called Clio and this led him to make a fateful pact with another arts student – Louis.
They all met when Adam played Dr Faustus in a college production, and Clio was Mephistopheles. Life imitating art? Most definitely.
Clio warns Adam not to get involved with Louis or her but he doesn’t take any notice. Louis is going to make a film of Adam’s life as a student. God only knows why thinks Adam; his life is so boring. But he agrees anyway and that’s when it all goes horribly wrong.
Twenty-four years later, Adam’s perfect life is beginning to unravel. But it all seems too far-fetched and unbelievable. Is he really being watched, stalked, filmed, all over again? Is Louis back, calling in a sinister Faustian pact they made after a terrible event at a drug-fuelled party? Why has Clio suddenly turned up after all these years? And will Tania believe him when he swears he’s innocent?
It becomes a race against time as Adam tries to protect his family before his ‘deal with the devil’ is called in. But he has one ally in all this – his old university friend Ji, obsessed with computer games and the dark web, where shocking videos are posted on a now defunct website called rotten.com. It was a ‘shock site’ which ran from 1996 until 2012. It was described as: “An archive of disturbing illustration…devoted to morbid curiosities, pictures of violent acts, deformities, autopsy or forensic photographs, depictions of perverse sex acts, and disturbing or misanthropic historical curiosities.” But that was not the worst of it as we discover later in the book.
I was almost afraid to research rotten.com and the dark web, because you know what they say – just because you are paranoid, doesn’t mean they are not after you. I’m waiting for a knock on the door…
This book was brilliant. By the end of stave nine on Pigeonhole, I almost bought the book on Kindle so I didn’t have to wait 24 hours for the final denouement. I’m glad I waited though. The ending was fantastic. I was almost late for work finishing it.
Many thanks to The Pigeonhole, the author and my fellow Pigeons for making this such an enjoyable read.
About the Author
J.S. Monroe, the writing name of a well-known British author and journalist, read English at Cambridge University, worked as a freelance journalist in London and was a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4. He was also a foreign correspondent in Delhi for the Daily Telegraph and was on its staff in London as weekend editor. He is the author of five other novels and lives in Wiltshire, England, with his wife and their three children.
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