T.M. Logan is one of my favourite authors of thrillers so I am delighted to participate in the blog tour for his latest book The Dream Home by sharing my review today. My enormous thanks to Tracy Fenton for inviting me to participate in the blog tour.

You’ll find my reviews of T.M. Logan’s The Mother, The Curfew and 29 Seconds here.

The Dream Home was published by Zaffre on 29th February 2024 and is available for purchase in all the usual places including here.

The Dream Home

Adam and Jess move into a new house with their three young children: a rambling Victorian villa in a nice neighbourhood right at the very top of their price range. Before long Adam discovers a door hidden behind a fitted wardrobe, concealing a secret room . . .

Inside Adam discovers a collection of forgotten items: a wallet, an expensive watch and an old mobile phone. Jess thinks they should simply throw them away. But Adam resists. He is fascinated by these items and how they came to be inside the hidden room.

But like the house, Adam has his secrets too. And soon he will find himself setting in motion a series of events that will place his family in terrible danger . . .

My Review of The Dream Home

Jess and Adam are moving into a new home.

Captivating from the very first sentence, The Dream Home is T.M. Logan at his very best. This is a story thrumming with menace and skilfully plotted so that it’s a really exciting and engrossing read that is impossible to predict. It’s also hugely entertaining. 

I loved the way the named, italicised passages are dropped into the narrative as extra hooks that compel the reader on. They are highly effective because they give the reader an insight that isn’t immediately obvious to Adam and this increases the tension. The pace is rapid and compelling and the closer to the end the reader gets, the faster their heart rate becomes. Throughout the story threatening occurrences feel only too plausible so that The Dream Home is taut and unsettling. Adding in the more prosaic, contrasting, aspects of Adam’s life in dealing with his young children, getting meals and doing the school run, for example, only adds to the sense of threat and peril when their life in their new home begins to unravel because they make the reader realise this level of danger and drama might be waiting for any one of us. 

Adam is an interesting character. He infuriated me because he withholds information from Jess, and because he sometimes behaves rashly, and yet I admired him too in his attempt to resolve the mysteries of the house, to find the links between the eclectic collection of items he discovers, and his desperation to protect his family. In fact, my conflicting feelings about Adam served to increase the impact of the book because I found my response to him somewhat conflicted and unbalanced – rather like the way he behaves at times.

Other characters are equally engaging and interesting. With T.M. Logan’s skilful writing, it’s impossible to know who can be trusted and who might be behind the threatening, terrifying events that occur when the Wylie family move into their dream home. I even wondered whether Jess herself might be the perpetrator, but you’ll need to read The Dream Home yourself to see how close to the truth I was! I also loved the sense of place. Having studied post-grad at Nottingham University I felt the way T.M. Logan described the city, and the area Jess and Adam are living in particularly, was so vivid it made the setting a character in its own right.

But The Dream Home is so much more than a cracking thriller. Themes within the story give it depth and layers. The overworked police, the sense of family and what a person might do to protect their loved ones, the role of employment in identity, our modern dependence on technology, the way in which those who are missing are often seen as unimportant or expendable, for example, all mean that the reader thinks about the story long after it is finished.

The Dream Home is an addictive, fast paced thriller that simply has to be consumed in as few sessions as possible because it’s impossible not to want to know what happens next. I absolutely loved it, but be warned. Your life won’t be your own if you choose to read The Dream Home. It’s too good to set aside for a moment! 

About T.M. Logan

TM Logan’s thrillers have sold more than a million copies in the UK and been translated into 22 other languages for publication around the world.

His thriller, Trust Me, begins when a woman is asked to look after a stranger’s baby on a train – only for the mother to vanish. When she looks in the baby’s things, she finds a note that says: ‘Please protect Mia. Don’t trust the police. Don’t trust anyone.’

The Curfew, coming March 2022, follows the events of a hot midsummer’s night, when five teenagers go up to the woods to celebrate the end of exams, and only four come out…

Tim’s thriller The Holiday was a Richard & Judy Book Club pick and spent ten weeks in the Sunday Times paperback top ten. It has since won a Nielsen Bestseller Award and been made into a four-part TV drama with Jill Halfpenny for Channel 5. The Catch recently aired on Channel 5 too.

A former national newspaper journalist, Tim has recently moved house!

For further information, exclusive writing, new releases and a FREE deleted scene from Tim, sign up to the Readers’ Club on his website. You can also follow him on Twitter @TMLoganAuthor, or find him on Facebook and on Instagram.

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