Book Review: Five Bad Deeds by Caz Frear

Ellen Walsh seems like the kind of woman who has it all, or – at the very least – is on the verge of attaining it. Married to the doting Adam, she’s the mother of beautiful teenage Orla and twin toddler sons Kian and Max. Their family lives in a charming suburban town called Thames Lawley, only an hour or so outside of London. They’ve just landed their dream house and are planning extensive renovations. While Ellen waits to hear about becoming head of the English department at a high school nearby, she works as a tutor, attempting to instill a passion for literature in teenage minds. 

But Ellen is not the perfect wife and mother that she seems. She is a woman with secrets, and five things that she’s done – that she knows now were selfish or inconsiderate or just plain wrong, no matter how well-intentioned her reasoning at the time – are coming back to haunt her. When she receives a threatening note, she tries to play it off as being just a cruel prank. After it becomes clear that someone is fomenting a relentless campaign of intimidation and fear against her though, Ellen will have to figure out who it is and put a stop to their cruelty before it escalates into the unimaginable. 

For it isn’t just about the shame and humiliation that would inevitably accompany the exposure of Ellen’s secrets. Someone could get seriously hurt, and Ellen knows she’s already harmed far too many people in her lifetime, even some of the ones she loves the most:

This is all my fault, I realised.

 

In her early adolescence, when Orla had needed a more intuitive style of parenting, the twins had been challenging babies, stealing my time and my sanity. Orla had got her first period the same day the boys were due their 6-in-1 vaccines, and as Kian had been grouchy afterwards, and Max biblically wrathful, I’d barely had time to acknowledge her milestone.

 

I’d failed her then and many times after. Suddenly it was overwhelmingly plain to see.

As Ellen tries to fix her life and mend her relationships, she’ll have to sift through a long list of suspects who might have it in for her. There’s Jason Bale, the local police constable who always seems to be watching her. There’s her own sister, Kristy, a former model who’s been living with her since events in Ibiza that they still don’t talk about. There’s her friend, Nush Delaney, who’s grown ever more brittle since a contentious divorce. Ellen quickly realizes that most of her relationships are fraught with unspoken tension, as she evaluates everyone around her:

Few people are [all bad]. Few people are all good either. When it comes right down to it, we’re just a mishmash of roles, and we can’t be good at all of them. You’re generally a top-notch friend but an impatient sister. An A-star colleague but a B-minus wife. I mean, only an hour ago, we had to listen to Nush insist again that while her ex, Tom, was undoubtedly a faithless cockroach of a husband, he was “such a wonderful father to Jasmine in so many ways’ (as though the construction of one rocking horse in 2007 made him the Lord of All Dads.)

Ellen, like most of her circle, is quicker to judge than to confess vulnerability, leading to a pressure cooker of emotions that threatens to explode and fracture all their psyches and relationships at any moment. But even as petty and self-absorbed as these people can be, who among them would stoop to violence to make Ellen suffer? And, perhaps more importantly, why?

Five Bad Deeds is a remarkably astute observation of modern morality and the seductive allure of stifling one’s feelings in the pursuit of getting along. It can sometimes be a bit tedious, reading about not-so-great adults doing poorly thought out things while assuring themselves that the consequences of their actions are somehow the fault of others, but Caz Frears packs this suburban thriller with enough jaw-dropping twists to keep readers hooked throughout. From the very first page, where we realize that Ellen is in prison, to the bittersweet ending, the book is a rollercoaster of both emotion and action. Told from the perspective of multiple residents of Thames Lawley, this novel will keep you guessing till the end.