Recent crime fiction | 25 June 2015
The act of reading always involves identification: with the story, the characters, the author’s intentions. Renée Knight takes this concept and pushes it to dangerous extremes in her psychological thriller Disclaimer (Doubleday, £12.99, pp. 304, Spectator Bookshop, £11.69). Catherine Ravenscroft finds a novel in her house which she doesn’t remember buying, and which seems to be telling the story of her own life. Her deepest, most terrible secrets are included. And the final page ends with her own murder. Is this a threat? How can the author have such an intimate knowledge of Catherine’s life, of events and feelings that she’s kept hidden even from her husband? This is a