Sarah Pinborough
Author of Behind Her Eyes
About the Author
Series
Works by Sarah Pinborough
A Little Magenta Book of Malevolence 8 copies
The Nowhere Man 3 copies
Our Man in the Sudan 3 copies
La stanza nascosta 2 copies
Магія 1 copy
Краса 1 copy
Grandmother's Slippers 1 copy
Snow Angels [short story] 1 copy
Отрута 1 copy
Associated Works
The Mammoth Book of Zombie Apocalypse! Fightback (Mammoth Books) (2012) — Contributor — 65 copies, 1 review
Mister October: An Anthology in Memory of Rick Hautala (Volume 2) (2013) — Contributor — 62 copies, 18 reviews
Mister October: An Anthology in Memory of Rick Hautala (Volumes 1 and 2) (2013) — Contributor — 17 copies, 15 reviews
The Future of Horror: The Collected Solaris Horror Anthologies, featuring House of Fear, Magic and End of the Road (2015) — Contributor — 8 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Other names
- Pinboro, Sarah
Пинбъра, Сара
Пинборо Сара
שרה פינבורו
핀보로, 사라
平博拉夫, 莎拉 - Birthdate
- 1972
- Gender
- female
- Occupations
- teacher
author - Organizations
- British Fantasy Society
Horror Writers Association - Agent
- Veronique Baxter (David Higham Associates)
- Short biography
- Sarah Pinborough is the NYT bestselling and Sunday Times #1 Bestselling author of 'Behind Her Eyes' which has sold in over 25 territories thus far and will be shown as a six part drama on Netflix in 2020 and the Sunday Times Bestseller, 'Cross Her Heart'. She has also written books across a variety of genres including the YA thriller 13 Minutes (in development with Netflix). Her next novel 'Dead To Her' comes out from William Morrow in the US in feb 2020 and HarperFiction in the UK in August 2020. It is already in development for US television.
- Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England, UK
- Places of residence
- Stoney Stratford, Buckinghamshire, England
- Map Location
- UK
Members
Discussions
Any thoughts on Sarah Pinborough in Thing(amabrarian)s That Go Bump in the Night (September 2008)
Reviews
Emily and Freddie Bennett are a London couple in need of a fresh start. Emily is recovering from a near-fatal holiday accident — a fall from a cliff that left her in a coma and now leaves her physically fragile, medically compromised, with post-sepsis symptoms that can cause hallucinations. Freddie has surprised her with Larkin Lodge, a grand but crumbling country house on remote Dartmoor. It should be a dream. It isn't. From the moment they arrive Emily feels it — a terrible wrongness show more emanating specifically from a sealed room on the third floor, so cold and bleak she can barely approach it. Strange things start happening: windows opening by themselves, sounds on the stairs, presences. But only when Emily is alone. Since her condition can cause hallucinations she can't fully trust her own senses, and Freddie notices nothing. Told in alternating chapters between Emily and Freddie, and — brilliantly — occasional chapters from the perspective of a raven mourning his dead mate on the property. Nods to Edgar Allan Poe throughout. From the author of Behind Her Eyes, which had the famous WTF ending.
[May contain spoilers]
The supernatural mechanics are genuinely inventive: the third-floor bedroom can resurrect the dead, but in doing so traps the negative, darker aspects of their personality in the house while the improved version of them walks free elsewhere. A previous resident, Sally Freemantle, was murdered by her husband Joe — but part of her jealous, violent nature is what's been haunting the lodge while her better self lived on outside. Christopher Hopper's hidden journal explains the lore. The reveal is that the house doesn't just harbor ghosts — it actively draws out and amplifies the worst in whoever lives there. Emily, it turns out, is no innocent — she had an affair with her boss Neil for career advancement, and becomes capable of blackmail. Freddie spirals toward genuinely murderous impulses. Once they both understand what the house is doing, they use that knowledge in deeply disturbing ways. The ending leaves a wonderful, lingering sense of unease rather than tidy resolution.
What I think: This is Pinborough doing exactly what she does best — taking a familiar genre framework and pulling the rug out completely with something genuinely fresh. The raven chapters are a lovely touch, the domestic marriage rot is uncomfortably real, and the supernatural twist is original enough to earn the WTF reaction. It might feel slightly overstuffed — infidelity, blackmail, murder, miscarriage, haunting — but Pinborough earns most of it. show less
[May contain spoilers]
The supernatural mechanics are genuinely inventive: the third-floor bedroom can resurrect the dead, but in doing so traps the negative, darker aspects of their personality in the house while the improved version of them walks free elsewhere. A previous resident, Sally Freemantle, was murdered by her husband Joe — but part of her jealous, violent nature is what's been haunting the lodge while her better self lived on outside. Christopher Hopper's hidden journal explains the lore. The reveal is that the house doesn't just harbor ghosts — it actively draws out and amplifies the worst in whoever lives there. Emily, it turns out, is no innocent — she had an affair with her boss Neil for career advancement, and becomes capable of blackmail. Freddie spirals toward genuinely murderous impulses. Once they both understand what the house is doing, they use that knowledge in deeply disturbing ways. The ending leaves a wonderful, lingering sense of unease rather than tidy resolution.
What I think: This is Pinborough doing exactly what she does best — taking a familiar genre framework and pulling the rug out completely with something genuinely fresh. The raven chapters are a lovely touch, the domestic marriage rot is uncomfortably real, and the supernatural twist is original enough to earn the WTF reaction. It might feel slightly overstuffed — infidelity, blackmail, murder, miscarriage, haunting — but Pinborough earns most of it. show less
What an absolute rollercoaster of a psychological thriller!
Sarah Pinborough weaves a twisted tale of love, secrets, and deception that’s unlike anything I’ve ever listened to. The story follows Louise, a single mom who gets entangled in a messy love triangle with her charming boss, David, and his enigmatic wife, Adele. What starts as a seemingly predictable drama spirals into a mind-bending web of lies, unreliable narrators, and a supernatural twist that I never saw coming.
The show more audiobook’s narration is phenomenal. They bring each character to life with distinct voices that amplify the tension and emotion. The pacing is perfect, building suspense slowly before hitting you with a double-twist ending that left me speechless.
It’s addictive, unsettling, and brilliantly crafted! If you love a story that keeps you guessing until the very last second, grab this audiobook and brace yourself for a wild ride. show less
Sarah Pinborough weaves a twisted tale of love, secrets, and deception that’s unlike anything I’ve ever listened to. The story follows Louise, a single mom who gets entangled in a messy love triangle with her charming boss, David, and his enigmatic wife, Adele. What starts as a seemingly predictable drama spirals into a mind-bending web of lies, unreliable narrators, and a supernatural twist that I never saw coming.
The show more audiobook’s narration is phenomenal. They bring each character to life with distinct voices that amplify the tension and emotion. The pacing is perfect, building suspense slowly before hitting you with a double-twist ending that left me speechless.
It’s addictive, unsettling, and brilliantly crafted! If you love a story that keeps you guessing until the very last second, grab this audiobook and brace yourself for a wild ride. show less
This book kept me on the edge of my seat. I listened to the audio book via cds in my car and cannot count how long I stayed in my car after parking just to hear a little more. The characters were vain and vapid and one of the best representations of how shallow teenagers can be. The story is tragic, but the twist is so good. I do wish there was a little more about what happened after where it ends, such as an epilogue, but it's also a very rounded ending. I'm definitely going to check out show more more of Pinborough's work. show less
Sarah Pinborough makes it clear from the first page of her prologue in A Matter of Blood that we’ll be seeing plenty of blood — and worse. The novel opens on the scene of a corpse squirming with maggots. An unnamed man stands in the doorway and declares that “This has to stop,” but the noise of the flies only grows louder. It seems, though, that the man is talking to someone — not to the corpse, not to himself, not even to the flies, though maybe he is speaking to someone through show more the flies. And maybe, we think, we’re on to something with that last thought, because as the speaker continues, the flies gather together and form into a shape that is nearly human.
It’s the last glimpse of the supernatural we get for a long time, though. Instead, Pinborough’s novel reads like a sharp, nicely detailed police procedural for most of its first half. The protagonist is Detective Inspector Cass Jones, who works in the Paddington Green precinct of a near-future London (as of the time the book was published) subtly different from the one in the real world. Cass is finely drawn: he is exceptionally smart, but has a strong tendency to self-defeating behavior, including ugly fights with a wife he loves, affairs with the wrong women, too many cigarettes and the occasional use cocaine. He has high friends in low places, but that’s not the reason most of his fellow officers despise him; he ran into some trouble while undercover a few years earlier, and some think he got off too easy. It seems that only his sergeant, Claire May, has any regard for him. Partly that’s because he’s good at what he does, and a good boss besides; partly it’s because they have a brief physical and emotional relationship in their recent past.
Cass has been assigned to the latest serial-killer murder; this is the fourth victim in two months. “Nothing is sacred,” say the words written on the latest female corpse in her own blood. He’s also working on the murder of two young boys who were the victims of a drive-by shooting, while the apparent intended victim of the shooting, another criminal, walked away. The cases are sufficiently all-consuming, but when a personal tragedy intervenes, Cass comes close to being overwhelmed. And even then, there is more real-world horror to be heaped on Cass’s head. It seems it’s never so bad that it can’t get worse, and worse keeps coming.
About midway through the book, though, Pinborough begins to make explicit what she has merely been hinting at thus far, and the supernatural takes a role in the events swirling about Cass. The doings of his brother’s employer, known merely as “The Bank,” begin to seem more far-reaching than the public realizes, and we wonder who is running the world that Pinborough has created. Pinborough subtly injects the supernatural into her tale as merely one more element in a straightforward mystery, so that the reader is hip deep in alligators before she even knows she’s walked into a swamp.
As a longtime mystery reader, especially one with a love for English mysteries, I was entranced by this novel from the outset. As a longtime horror reader, I quickly recognized that Pinborough was dealing with horrors worse than those humans inflict on one another. Pinborough skillfully deploys the science fictional elements of the near-future effects of the 2008 Great Recession with the police procedural set in the nitty gritty world of police work with the horrors that can only be wreaked by ancient gods fighting one another, and the forces of entropy, for their very survival.
A Matter of Blood is the first in the FORGOTTEN GODS trilogy. It is, however, largely self-contained. You won’t find any explicit cliffhangers here, and Pinborough gives us solutions to the major crimes Jones is investigating in this novel. Still, threads are left hanging — a sufficient number of them to lead a reader to grab the second book in the trilogy as soon as she closes the covers on this first one. Turn off the phone, lock the doors, leave the lights on, and read; once Pinborough captures you, you are enthralled to the end.
Originally published at http://www.fantasyliterature.com/reviews/horrible-monday-a-matter-of-blood-by-sa.... show less
It’s the last glimpse of the supernatural we get for a long time, though. Instead, Pinborough’s novel reads like a sharp, nicely detailed police procedural for most of its first half. The protagonist is Detective Inspector Cass Jones, who works in the Paddington Green precinct of a near-future London (as of the time the book was published) subtly different from the one in the real world. Cass is finely drawn: he is exceptionally smart, but has a strong tendency to self-defeating behavior, including ugly fights with a wife he loves, affairs with the wrong women, too many cigarettes and the occasional use cocaine. He has high friends in low places, but that’s not the reason most of his fellow officers despise him; he ran into some trouble while undercover a few years earlier, and some think he got off too easy. It seems that only his sergeant, Claire May, has any regard for him. Partly that’s because he’s good at what he does, and a good boss besides; partly it’s because they have a brief physical and emotional relationship in their recent past.
Cass has been assigned to the latest serial-killer murder; this is the fourth victim in two months. “Nothing is sacred,” say the words written on the latest female corpse in her own blood. He’s also working on the murder of two young boys who were the victims of a drive-by shooting, while the apparent intended victim of the shooting, another criminal, walked away. The cases are sufficiently all-consuming, but when a personal tragedy intervenes, Cass comes close to being overwhelmed. And even then, there is more real-world horror to be heaped on Cass’s head. It seems it’s never so bad that it can’t get worse, and worse keeps coming.
About midway through the book, though, Pinborough begins to make explicit what she has merely been hinting at thus far, and the supernatural takes a role in the events swirling about Cass. The doings of his brother’s employer, known merely as “The Bank,” begin to seem more far-reaching than the public realizes, and we wonder who is running the world that Pinborough has created. Pinborough subtly injects the supernatural into her tale as merely one more element in a straightforward mystery, so that the reader is hip deep in alligators before she even knows she’s walked into a swamp.
As a longtime mystery reader, especially one with a love for English mysteries, I was entranced by this novel from the outset. As a longtime horror reader, I quickly recognized that Pinborough was dealing with horrors worse than those humans inflict on one another. Pinborough skillfully deploys the science fictional elements of the near-future effects of the 2008 Great Recession with the police procedural set in the nitty gritty world of police work with the horrors that can only be wreaked by ancient gods fighting one another, and the forces of entropy, for their very survival.
A Matter of Blood is the first in the FORGOTTEN GODS trilogy. It is, however, largely self-contained. You won’t find any explicit cliffhangers here, and Pinborough gives us solutions to the major crimes Jones is investigating in this novel. Still, threads are left hanging — a sufficient number of them to lead a reader to grab the second book in the trilogy as soon as she closes the covers on this first one. Turn off the phone, lock the doors, leave the lights on, and read; once Pinborough captures you, you are enthralled to the end.
Originally published at http://www.fantasyliterature.com/reviews/horrible-monday-a-matter-of-blood-by-sa.... show less
Lists
At the Library (1)
Gaslamp Fantasy (2)
Awards
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 52
- Also by
- 28
- Members
- 8,673
- Popularity
- #2,766
- Rating
- 3.6
- Reviews
- 450
- ISBNs
- 348
- Languages
- 15
- Favorited
- 6