January 14, 2026

The Tenant, by M. Berry

In The Tenant, by M. Barry (a pseudonym for the writer Michelle Berry), bestselling thriller writer Amy Ellis has been unable to write anything since birth of her daughter, but hopes that her family’s year-long sojourn to Freiburg, Germany, delivers a solution to this—her husband has a contract at a non-profit there, their daughter will be enrolled in daycare, her husband’s company has secured the family with a lovely rental house. Except that the house comes with unexpected feature, a tenant, a slightly odd English woman called who’s living in the attic flat. A double booking, maybe? Eleanor is a bit vague about it, and nobody seems able to contact the landlord, and so Amy and her husband decide to just live with it. Eleanor seems harmless enough, and she begins to help out with Amy’s daughter, delivering her to and from her preschool, leaving Amy’s days free to finally write her book—a novel inspired by a series of mysterious killings that are dominating news headlines.

But the reader, of course, is privy to Eleanor’s point of view, and soon learns that the tenant is not so harmless after all. And that her presence is Amy’s rental house is part of a carefully laid out plan that Amy has no idea she is walking straight into, and that the thriller that she’s writing is actually her real life, a story with shades of Misery or The Shining.

I tore through this book in a day, and got more and more gripped as the tension ramped up. And while I can’t say that the plot was watertight—there were some holes; it was baggy in places—this was still a satisfying, riveting, and most enjoyable read.