Someone Out There by Catherine Hunt

ISBN-13: 9780008165253
Publisher: Harper
Publication Date: December 2015
Format: Paperback, 390 pgs
Source: Purchased

Someone Out There not only has a grabbing title but it is also an intense psychological thriller that had me at the edge of my seat. 

Laura Maxwell seems to have it all - she is a successful solicitor and she has a good-looking, loving husband whose family runs a hotel business so their life is blissful and perfect in anyone's eyes. However, since Laura took up the Pelham divorce case there are a series of accidents which cause her to believe they aren't coincidental and that someone is watching her and wanting her dead. 

Her client, Anna Pelham, wants to get a divorce from her abusing husband and gets a custody of their daughter, Martha. Harry Pelham is hot-tempered, impulsive and gets jealous easily. Laura totally understands Anna's decision of getting a divorce and she will try every means to win the case. Anna fears for her safety as well as for Martha, and she is sure the two death threats emails she has received lately came from Harry too, though they had not come from his email address. 

But that is not all that occupies Laura's mind. She faces some difficulty at work in which a colleague has forgotten to do a proper procedure for another case and has landed both of them in hot soup. Their superior, Marcus Morrison, wants them to cover their mistake without tarnishing the firm's image but in the end, it just got worsened and her colleague is fired. Morrison can be ruthless when it all comes to business and protecting himself. 

While this story mostly centers around the culprit targeting Laura (oh, the intensity!), the reader also gets to know more about the secondary characters (they can be quite complex) and how they all got entangled in Laura's "mess". While the culprit's identity is revealed during the last quarter of the story, it will still keep the reader engrossed because of the culprit's motive. Overall, it is an impressive debut by UK author Catherine Hunt and I am very curious to know what she will be writing next.