Ellis Locke

Ellis Locke writes psychological thrillers about ordinary people and the quiet rooms that turn out not to be safe. A lifelong reader of the kind of book you finish at 3 a.m. and then immediately flip back to the beginning of, Locke is drawn to stories where the real danger isn't a stranger at the door but the version of events you've been handed, and the person kind enough to keep handing it to you.

Locke's novels live in small, fog-bound, easy-to-overlook places, and turn on a single revelation that reorders everything that came before. The Long Kindness, the story of a woman who empties the houses of the dead and finds nine boxes on a condemned cliff with her own name on every one, in a stranger's handwriting, is written in that tradition: fair-play to the last clue, and one ending you won't see coming until you realise you should have all along.

Ask My Sister, coming soon, is a standalone domestic thriller in the same tradition: a photograph of a kitchen sent from the wrong address, a missing girl, a tide that will not wait, and the lie one sister once told for the other about the night a man died in a locked washhouse.

Locke lives where the coast goes gray for most of the year and writes best when the foghorns are sounding.