Sally likes James but James likes Emma. Sally doesn’t trust Emma, but can she protect James from his own naivety?

I was excited to get my hands on an uncorrected proof of Louise Mangos’ latest psychological thriller, ‘The Girl in the Doorway’, having been lucky enough to nab one at this year’s Crimefest.

What’s it about?

When bookseller James meets homeless student Emma on a London street, the attraction is instant. But after a magical Christmas break in the glitzy ski resort of St. Moritz, they return to find his flat has been burgled, and the police want to question James about the suspicious death of another homeless person.

As he and his friend Sally chase clues from the West End of London to the snow-laden mountains of Switzerland to solve the mystery of his stolen antique books and family heirlooms, James is forced to ask himself whether he has been desperately unlucky, blinded by love, or worse.

Will rescuing the homeless student be his greatest mistake?

What’s it like?

According to most of the internet, gripping and suspenseful. Mangos alternates chapters between three first person points of view: James, Emma and James’ friend, Sally. James is oblivious to Emma’s scheming and Sally’s dreaming and is clearly Mr Super Nice Guy, though irritatingly relaxed about his life choices (consequences are pretty much meaningless when you and your family are stupidly rich).

‘Clues were connecting like synapses in my mind. The extent of the deception was blowing open like a supernova.’

It should feel very dramatic as the theft is discovered and the characters start trying to unravel the puzzle they’ve created, but I just didn’t feel the drama. Instead, everything felt too telegraphed. Emma is lying. Now Sally is doing something odd. The final dramatic developments felt too obviously planned to surprise or shock me. I do realise that this is very much a minority opinion. Perhaps my reactions were partly because the blurb revealed so much of the story that it felt like I was waiting for almost the entire length of the story for the plot to develop in a way that hadn’t already been signposted.

Final thoughts

I wanted to like this (heck, having listened to Mangos speak at Crimefest I wanted to love it), but I’m afraid this one just…fell flat for me. Maybe it was the ending, which felt like a shrug. Maybe it was the characters, all of whom I wanted to shake some sense into. Maybe it was the social mileu in which the story is set. I’m just not ever going to be the kind of person who does ‘the season’ in St Moritz or elsewhere and it turns out that I’m not interested in reading about it either.

‘The Girl in the Doorway’,
Louise Mangos,
2025, Mana Publishing, paperback