Creep - Jennifer Hillier
Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: Sphere
ISBN-10: 0751549010
ISBN-13: 978-0751549010
22 Dec 2011
Jennifer Hillier has created with Creep – her debut novel – an almost perfect piece of crime fiction that tears through the all the established barriers.
Psychology professor Dr Sheila Tao is an expert on human behaviour, so when she begins an affair with charming graduate student Ethan Wolfe, she's well aware she's playing with fire. Consumed by lust and riddled with guilt, Sheila ends their three month fling when she becomes engaged to a kind and loving man who adores her. But Ethan has different plans.
Deeply disturbing, intensely graphic in parts, gripping and beautifully written, Hillier has taken what on the face of it might appear to be a run-of-the-mill scenario an imbued with an ambience that is positively unique, thanks largely to the deftly drawn characters she has drawn so well you cannot help but like or loathe by degrees.
The sense of place, too, is vivid the reader is instantly transported to the world of the author’s protagonists in spite of the trepidation that each page – each word, almost – instils and so carries them along on a wave of excitement and fear.
Not since Mo Hayder has such a debut novel been written with such graphic subtlety and not since Gillian Flynn has a debut been so intense in its telling and it only remains to recommend this fabulous novel as heartily and enthusiastically as possible.
Chris High
Chris High interviews Jennifer Hillier - January 2012
break the rules as I see fit.” - Chris High 2003.