The Killer Next Door, Alex Marwood

o. 23 Beulah Grove is the kind of place people end up when they have nowhere else to go. A decaying South London boarding house with thin walls, locked doors and tenants who keep to themselves, it’s the perfect refuge for those trying to escape their pasts — or bury their secrets.

Collette is running from a man who wants her dead. Cher is a teenager with nowhere safe to sleep. Thomas is invisible by choice, the Iranian asylum-seeker is hiding in fear, and the quiet man in the corner flat… well, nobody really knows him at all. Watching over them from the ground floor is Vesta, the ageing tenant who thinks she’s seen it all.

But when a sudden, grisly accident forces the unlikely neighbours into an uneasy alliance, they begin to realise that one of them is far more dangerous than the rest. Someone in the building is a killer — meticulous, patient, and ready to strike again.

As a suffocating heatwave grips the city, tensions rise, secrets leak, and the horror lurking behind one locked door threatens to engulf them all.

A dark, original and compulsively readable thriller, The Killer Next Door will make you think twice about who lives on the other side of your wall.