Into the Darkest Corner

When Catherine meets Lee, he seems too good to be true: handsome, attentive, and utterly devoted. But his charm slowly curdles into control, and then into something far more dangerous, until the vibrant young woman she used to be has been all but erased.

Four years later, Catherine lives alone in London, her days ruled by the crushing rituals of obsessive-compulsive disorder—checking, counting, and locking, over and over—the only way she can hold her terror at bay. She is beginning, cautiously, to rebuild, helped by a kind new neighbour. Then she learns that the man who destroyed her is about to be released, and the fragile safety she has built threatens to collapse.

Told in two braided timelines that circle toward the truth of what happened, Elizabeth Haynes's debut Into the Darkest Corner is a harrowing, tightly wound psychological thriller about coercive control, survival, and the long shadow an abuser can cast.