The Company She Keeps – James Woolf

England, 1979. After a childhood trauma, Rebecca struggles to build healthy relationships. Her on-again-off-again partner is a married police officer trying to catch the Yorkshire Ripper, who has just claimed his tenth victim.

Then Rebecca meets Larry, a charming American with a troubled past.

And of course there’s Mervyn, the creepy journalist she ended a brief relationship with, who will do anything to keep her in his life . . .

With three very different men craving her attention, and a serial killer on the loose, Rebecca soon finds herself in a twisted game of cat and mouse. Can any of these men be trusted? And could one of them in fact be a cold-blooded killer?

Review

Expanding from 1979 to 1981, The Company She Keeps is set when the Yorkshire Ripper is on the loose and terrorising the nation. Ok!

Our MC, Rebecca, has great success on the professional side but not so much on the romantic one. An understatement, actually. She just ended a relationship with a morally questionable policeman, Simon, started kind of seeing a weird dude that fixates on her, and finally we have Larry, a man whose wife’s death haunts him in more ways than one.

Rebecca is one hell of a woman! She is determined, clever, and good news for readers: she doesn’t suffer from dumb main character syndrome. Thank you, James Woolf.

Moving on to the story now… I felt like everything was very straightforward and obvious; I don’t know how else to put it. It was like watching a Scooby Doo episode where there’s only one rich guy who treats people badly, and, oh, who could possibly be behind the mask??
It’s a (good!) safe ride.

Now, I’ll talk specifically about the audiobook. I certainly felt like the narrator gave a cosy vibe more than a thriller-ish, mysterious one until about the 75% mark. If you do read the book with your own eyes, I think you’ll have the full experience of the darkness of the story. This is one of the very few instances where I would have preferred to have read the book in its entirety rather than have alternated or listened to it fully on audiobook.