Behind Closed Doors

Behind Closed Doors is a psychological thriller by the British writer B. A. Paris, published in 2016. It is narrated by a wife whose marriage is not what the people around her believe it to be, and it keeps the reader inside her view of it throughout.

Grace and her husband Jack look like the couple other people envy. He has money and looks; she is charming, elegant and an accomplished cook; and they are never apart, which the people who know them read as devotion rather than as something that cannot be broken. Invitations arrive, and are managed.

The details that do not fit are small at first. Grace never answers the telephone and cannot meet anyone for coffee even though she has no job, and one of the bedrooms has bars on its window. What is clear from the beginning is that she has reasons for the way she behaves and that those reasons have a history, and the novel moves between her account of the marriage and the events that led into it.