Genre: Domestic Thriller / Psychological Suspense Award: International Thriller Writers Best Paperback 2021 Review by: Gina Marie | @ginamariefit Rating: 4 stars
She chains her mother to the wall in the attic every single night. And you will spend this entire book deciding if she is the villain.
What the f did I just read. I said that out loud multiple times while reading this book and I need to talk about it. What Lies Between Us by John Marrs is my second book by him after Dead in the Water and he continues to prove that he is one of the most psychologically complex thriller writers working right now.
This one is different from Dead in the Water. More personal. More claustrophobic. And in some ways even more unsettling because it never leaves the walls of one house.
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The Premise
Nina and Maggie share a home. On the surface that is all it looks like. Two women. One house.
The reality is something else entirely.
Every other night Nina and Maggie sit across from each other and share dinner together. They eat. They talk. And when the meal is finished Nina walks her mother back upstairs to her room in the attic and secures the heavy chain that keeps her there.
Because Maggie did things to Nina that cannot be forgiven. Things so terrible that Nina cannot let her leave and cannot allow her to forget that there are consequences for what she did.
But there are things about the past that Nina does not know. Things Maggie has been keeping buried. And in this house the truth is more dangerous than the lies holding everything together.
Two Narrators. Neither of Them Trustworthy.
The structure of What Lies Between Us is what makes it genuinely extraordinary. The book alternates between both perspectives. Past and present. Mother and daughter. And both of them are unreliable narrators with very specific reasons to shape the story in their favor.
You spend every single page asking yourself the same question. Who is actually telling the truth?
John Marrs gives you just enough from each perspective to keep you invested in both women simultaneously. You understand Nina. You understand Maggie. And that understanding is exactly what makes this book so deeply unsettling because you cannot fully condemn either of them even when you know you probably should.
The First Third
I want to be honest about the reading experience going in because I think it matters. For the first third of this book I had zero idea what was actually going on beneath the surface.
You know something deeply messed up happened between these two women. You can feel the weight of it pressing down on every single interaction, every shared meal, every moment of forced normalcy between a mother chained to a wall and the daughter who put her there. But the specifics of what Maggie did, the thing Nina cannot forgive, are revealed slowly and deliberately.
Marrs makes you wait for it. And the waiting is almost unbearable in the best possible way.
When It All Comes Out
When this book finally drops what it has been hiding it is a full stop moment. Put the book down. Sit there. Process what you just read.
I will not spoil what that revelation is. What I will tell you is that it reframes everything that came before it in a way that is both shocking and somehow inevitable once you see it. The kind of reveal that makes you flip back through the pages looking for all the moments you missed.
The themes running through this story are genuinely heavy. Parental obsession. Deception. How trauma and cycles of abuse pass from one generation to the next. This is not a thriller that is dark for shock value. It is dark because the subject matter demands it and Marrs handles it with real intention and care.
Why John Marrs Is Different
This is only my second John Marrs book and he is already on my forever YES author list. What he does that most thriller writers never achieve is write people rather than villains. People who do terrible things for reasons that feel internally logical even when they are completely horrifying from the outside.
That psychological complexity is what separates his work from the rest of the genre. The claustrophobic setting of one house, two women, and decades of buried secrets works perfectly here. There is nowhere to go. No escape. And that trapped feeling transfers directly off the page and into your chest as a reader.
This book won the International Thriller Writers Best Paperback of 2021 and after reading it I completely understand why.
Final Verdict
What Lies Between Us is one of the most unsettling domestic thrillers I have read this year. Dark, claustrophobic, psychologically complex, and built around two of the most compelling and morally complicated characters I have encountered in the genre. The slow reveal of the first third is absolutely worth the wait and that ending will stay with you long after you close the cover.
If you love psychological thrillers that make you question everything and everyone from page one to the very last line this one belongs at the top of your TBR immediately.
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Have you read What Lies Between Us? Drop your rating in the comments and tell me who you thought the real villain was because I genuinely need to compare notes. 📚👇
