With her third novel, The Point of Rescue, Sophie Hannah has proved that she is just such a talent. After the word-of-mouth success of her first two novels, Little Face and Hurting Distance, fans have been dying to find out what Hannah will deliver next, and The Point of Rescue certainly doesn't disappoint.

Sally Thorning is overworked: two small children, a busy job, a husband who doesn't seem much help. When a business trip she's supposed to be going on is cancelled, she doesn't tell her husband: instead, she books into a hotel for a secret week of recharging her batteries.

There, she unexpectedly meets a man called Mark Bretherick, and her secret week turns into a complete holiday from her life.

A year later, watching the news with her husband, she hears the name again: Mark Bretherick. The details are all the same – where he lives, his job, his wife Geraldine and daughter Lucy. But the Mark Bretherick pictured on the television news is a man she's never even seen before, and Geraldine and Lucy are both dead. The story that unfolds is genuinely gripping, full of the unseen and yet fitting twists and turns that make good quality crime fiction such a pleasure.

Alongside Sally's first person story, as she discovers that someone now wants her dead, we also see diary entries that seem to show a nasty side to Geraldine's family life, and the developing investigation complicated by the relationship between Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer, Hannah's police series characters. The plot is a little awkward in a couple of places as the characters manoeuvre into position for the final climax, but that barely qualifies as a criticism; the tale is complex enough for this not to matter.

The combination of all the different strands of the story gives The Point of Rescue a great sense of pace, with real surprises all the way.

As well as being an increasingly successful crime writer, Sophie Hannah is a prize-winning poet, and that skill with words is evident throughout. By turns funny, tense and emotionally pointed, whether we're hearing the story first-hand from a potential victim or seeing it through the eyes of a police officer, Hannah's use of language is precise yet evocative. She puts us right in the scene, empathising with almost every character. And those characters feel alive; they make flawed, yet human, decisions. Their choices may put them into the path of danger, but they also attempt to get out of that danger. There is nothing passive about them, even when they are victims, and that in itself is a refreshing take on the crime thriller.

But perhaps Hannah's greatest strength is the way she uses the conventions of the crime genre to produce novels that are indulgent pleasures, but with an extra edge. The Point of Rescue isn't simply a woman-in-jeopardy yarn about an overworked mother whose dreams of escape turn into a nightmare that threatens to destroy her life (although it works brilliantly on this level), it is also about the thrill of transgression, and the dangers that lurk within the most appealing of fantasies. Which parent of young children hasn't guiltily imagined breaking free of their responsibilities, even for one fantastical moment? Hannah presents us with a world where danger lurks nearby, unrecognised until someone takes those few short steps away from their responsibilities.


Sophie Hannah
Hodder & Stoughton £12.99