The Lonely Places

In the electrifying tradition of Minette Walters and Ruth Rendell, J. M. Morris savagely plumbs the depths of psychological terror in an uncompromising and brutally brilliant suspense debut. The Lonely Places etches a fiendishly compelling portrait of madness and menace, eroticism and terror, that pits a woman’s mind against a world where nothing is as it seems.

THE LONELY PLACES

“Then along came a spider Who sat down beside her...”

Ruth Gemmill is broken. All she has known, all she has loved, all she has ever desired, have laid her waste. As autumn’s shadows begin to seep through her London home, Ruth escapes to the fading twilight of northern England in a last, desperate attempt to stave off the encroaching darkness. She needs the consolation of her brother, Alex: a man she cannot breathe without.

It’s not the first time. She couldn’t breathe without Matt either. Matt, who used to beat her. Matt, who loved to hurt her. Matt, whom she loved with a masochistic passion that destroyed everything in its path. But Ruth moved on, reinvented herself. Ruth found the strength to escape the terrifying abuse of her domestic existence. Or so she would like to think. Little does she realize the extent of the crippling cobwebs her vicious lover has spun throughout her mind.

But in the grim, foreboding town of Greenwell, where her brother now lives, fate deals Ruth another blow. For Alex has disappeared. To bring him safely home, she will be forced to confront her emotional demons through a bewildering landscape, where the phantoms of a menacing past lurk around every corner, wielding memories, determined to wake Ruth up to the most horrifying reality of all. Some webs can never be swept away, some spiders sting to destroy....

With chilling emotional precision and searing insight, J. M. Morris has created a novel that is at once devastatingly plausible, utterly poignant—and impossible to forget.

From the Hardcover edition.