Let’s swap murders: Amanda Craig’s The Golden Rule reviewed

It has been three years since Amanda Craig’s previous novel, The Lie of the Land, the story of a foundering marriage set among the gathering shadows of Brexit. The Golden Rule is worth the wait. It opens with a nod to Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, the classic thriller in which two strangers, meeting by chance on a train, agree to murder each other’s wives. In this case, the genders are reversed, and the strangers are two women, Hannah and Jinni, who meet on the long journey from London to Cornwall.

Hannah, the central character, has escaped from her working-class Cornish family via university to London. But life has turned sour. Her husband, an entitled aristocratic sprig named Jake, has left her and their young daughter Maisy for the glamorous Eve. He is calculatedly cruel to her and rarely pays his share of the bills — so much so that Hannah is forced to clean other people’s houses to make ends meet.