THE FALL is her first novel, which is followed by a series starring forensic psychologist Paula Maguire. Mary is a mum of two young children who is totally exhausted with this role but unable to sleep so she escapes to the park. The two meet when they venture outside of their respective houses in the middle of a sleepless night after “witnessing” what appears to be “violence” in the attic room of a boarded up house across the park. There definitely were more intriguing plot lines in this story and they were all woven together so well.

Together they team up to solve "who the fuck is that lady in the dilapidated house across the street". Unfolding through the alternating narratives of Mary and Tim, there is also the odd narrative from the missing Samantha, leaving you wondering what exactly has happened to her. Tim, on the other hand, seems like a fairly stand-up kind of guy when he’s not spying on his ex-wife, Alice.As if the author just had to fill the word count for each page and couldn’t find anything better to say. While both characters' backstories provided sufficient insight into their insomnia and sleep deprivation, I did tire of Mary's two year old daughter Audrey's constant and incessant whining and complaints on just about everything. The storyline kept you guessing for the most part of the book, and the big twist was not what I expected at all. I usually find the amateur sleuth trope frustrating - it’s often unbelievable how much they get involved but I found myself thinking had I been in Mary’s position I would have done the same thing - it would infuriate me how the police didn’t seem to care about their tip. One thing to know about these two, because it will be repeated incessantly for the first quarter of the book: They’re tired.

They end up being partners who are trying to find out what they saw one night in an abandoned home in their neighborhood.

Without thinking, she deposits the children back to bed and barely stopping to grab a robe, Mary marches out the door and across the street to where the stranger is snooping. Can she still function as an adult in an adult world or has she become one with the group of mothers who only talk about the healthiest formula for babies? Her two young children never let her rest, so one exhausting night, in the middle of a London heatwave, she escapes to a nearby park for some air.