The Good Book

Stubberfield opens with a gut-punch — a four-year-old crushed under a tractor's plough discs, the sound of it ('Toonk!') seared into Rebecca's memory as a lifelong trauma trigger — and then, without pausing for breath, drops us into a death-row cell the night before her execution, confessing to a rookie priest that she's killed twenty-three people. That's a hook few thriller readers will put down. The reveal that Rebecca is gay, an atheist, and a former accountant recruited to pose as a radical Christian nationalist infiltrating a militia group ('The Guardians of the Constitution') run by a colonel's wife is a genuinely fresh premise — the closeted-outsider-playing-true-believer setup gives the book comic bite most political thrillers don't attempt. The bar scene where Rebecca and David rehearse her cover identity by hurling slurs at each other until the barman thinks they're 'rehearsing for a play' is a standout — funny, unsettling, and character-revealing all at once, and it does real narrative work: showing us exactly how far Rebecca is willing to go, and how well she can wear a lie.

The prose itself is uneven — some sentences need another editing pass ('Everything was as as it should have been') — but the structural instincts are sound: a framed confession narrative that promises payoff, a recurring sensory motif ('toonk') doing the job of unifying trauma and tone, and a villain-protagonist whose contempt for the people she's about to destroy is earned rather than asserted. This is a book built for readers who want their thrillers with teeth and a wicked sense of humor, and on that promise, it delivers.