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As someone who has worked in the beauty industry for most of my adult life, I know that there's something soothing about a skincare routine. The familiar order of cleanser, serum, moisturiser and oil can feel less like vanity than a small act of control. The promises printed on the bottles are wonderfully specific: brighter skin, softened lines, renewed firmness, visible transformation. Use this product for long enough and a better version of your face, and perhaps your life,

Grotesque escalation can produce horror, but repeated extremity eventually flattens feeling. Once every doorway leads to another atrocity, atrocity becomes expectation. The reader might continue because the solution remains tantalising, yet the emotional response is narrowed to shock.

A white bird sits inside a black and thorny tree. Five drawings left by a woman who died during childbirth form a hidden image when placed together. A young boy covers part of his picture in heavy black strokes. A murdered art teacher leaves behind a landscape that appears to record his final moments.

My youngest daughter assured me I would love Strange Houses. After all, she knows me! Knows I love a good mystery.

At first, everything feels reassuringly familiar. April Masterson appears to have built the sort of life many people quietly aspire to. She has a successful baking channel on YouTube, a beautiful home, a husband with a respected career and a place at the centre of her suburban community. She's the mother who bakes for school events, organises fundraisers and always seems to know the right thing to say. Then the anonymous text messages begin.

Rather than remaining confined to a single storyline, Vince finds himself exploring a range of communities and motivations. The inclusion of the Amish community, the political campaign, and the strange run of gambling success all seem disconnected at first, but Pomare clearly has a knack for bringing disparate elements together in very clever ways.

Alicia is, in many ways, the still centre of the novel. Everything moves around her. Doctors, journalists, lawyers, Theo, who is the psychotherapist fixated on her case, all attempt to interpret her, and to translate her silence into something they can understand. But the more the novel unfolds, the clearer it becomes that Alicia isn't as passive as she appears. Her paintings, particularly Alcestis, hold more truth than any spoken explanation could.

Millie lives inside a secret she cannot afford to tell. Wendy constructs a secret she needs others to believe. And somewhere between the two, the idea of truth becomes less about what happened and more about who controls the narrative of what seems to have happened.

Momentum is a strange kind of power in fiction. Some novels persuade slowly, almost imperceptibly; others seize you outright, pulling you forward with such force that resistance feels pointless. Along Came a Spider belongs, unmistakably, to the latter. It is not a novel that lingers at the edges of a reader’s attention—it insists, from its opening pages, on being followed.