A Neighbor's Guide to Murder

by Louise Candlish

Genres: Black Humor; Amateur Sleuth; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

From internationally bestselling author Louise Candlish, a witty psychological thriller where an older woman's suspicions about her charming new neighbor ignite a deadly spiral in their luxury apartment building.

In Columbia Mansions, secrets don’t stay behind closed doors for long.

It's rare for a room to open up in London’s storied Columbia Mansions, and lonely Gwen is thrilled when her neighbor’s new subletter, Pixie, brings a friendly breath of fresh air to its stuffy halls. Their unexpected bond soon becomes the bright spot in Gwen’s quiet life. But Gwen can’t help noticing cracks beneath Pixie's cheerful surface—especially when it comes to her questionable financial arrangement with her live-in landlord, Alec.

As suspicions mount, Gwen’s protective instincts go into overdrive, triggering a dangerous chain of events no one is prepared for. The last thing Columbia Mansions wants is a scandal on its hands ... Let alone a murder.

Release date: July 7, 2026

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 336

Sample

Alec’s message to Pixie is as good a place to start as any. You can see for yourself why it might have given the poor girl hope—she was, after all, emotionally bruised and in urgent need of a place to live.

Hey. Got your SOS. Room might still be free, depends. Could come to an arrangement regarding the rent?

The funny thing is she almost didn’t see it because it was in “hidden requests” and she usually deleted those without reading them. Every so often, though, she scrolled through them “for shits ’n’ gigs.” Of course, being the ancient crone that I was—I only used Facebook and even that stupefied me with its ever-changing wizardry—I had to ask her to explain what “hidden requests” were.

(“Shits ’n’ gigs” too.)

Anyway, for those who don’t know, they are unsolicited and potentially offensive messages on Instagram. Brazen strangers professing curiosity as to one’s “sexy baby side”; religious blessings from self-anointed priestesses; gobbledygook from malfunctioning bots. That kind of thing. But in this case, the username caught her eye—@queensoaklandlord—and it didn’t take long to deduce that this was the man whose spare room she had recently viewed in Columbia Mansions.

Alec Pedley was his name. You’ll be seeing it a lot in these pages because he is the protagonist of my story. Or should I say antagonist? Hero or villain, you decide.

But back to that hidden request. You’d have thought that his not having a more direct way of communicating with her—her phone number, for instance—would have been warning enough not to involve herself with him, but when I made that point to her, she disagreed. There’s a bit of a story there, Gwen (there often was) and, to cut it short, she’d given him her friend’s number because she’d had her own phone stolen in a club and what with missed deliveries and other miscommunications it took three days for her to be connected again.

“It all sounds unnecessarily complicated,” I told her, but complicated arrangements were a hallmark of Pixie’s lifestyle and in any case, by the time I made the comment, we had significantly bigger things to worry about.

But look at me, I’m plunging into this at totally the wrong point. That shows you how disordered my thoughts are, how tormented I still am by everything that’s happened. I need to compose myself, tell this tale chronologically.

Let’s go back to the first time she met Alec, on a damp, sun-streaked afternoon in late September—though neither damp enough nor sun-streaked enough to produce a rainbow.

You might as well know at the outset that rainbows don’t feature a whole lot in this story.

Alec was one of two leaseholders in Columbia Mansions who’d taken advantage of the company’s recent vote to allow the government’s Rent a Room Scheme.

I remember his citing “cozzie livs” in one discussion, a term for cost of living that I found most distasteful, but struggling with bills was not an experience our co-directors Dee or Noel had ever had, and Dee in particular had been amused by his roguish slang.

Pixie was the last of thirty or so people to troop in and out of his flat that Saturday in the hopes of being picked as his new roommate. The inaugural one, a nurse named Yasmin, had moved out the previous weekend. He’d scheduled candidates in groups of four so they could enjoy the “frisson of competition,” as he put it.

“Sounds a bit like speed dating,” I told him.

He scoffed. “Why, you want to throw your hat in the ring?”

“Hardly.” I narrowed my eyes at him through my glasses. “I’m quite happy with the accommodation I’ve got, thank you very much.”

“I’m sure you are.” He winked at me then, though it’s possible I imagined that. Alec had an unreconstructed sense of humor, a pouncing, ribald wit that is no doubt considered outmoded now, if not downright offensive. His look was as bold as his character: strong nose, craggy eyebrows, tar-black eyes with that depthless quality many find so unnerving—a sense of some inner void, perhaps.

His style of dress was unfussy, even unkempt, and he’d let himself go physically (corpulent is the word I’d use), but we all have our battles with willpower, don’t we? In years, he was pushing fifty.

“Anyway, it’ll be more like a bidding war if I’m lucky,” he said.

“Is that fair, Alec? Fifteen hundred is a lot to begin with.”

He chuckled as if fairness were an absurd notion. When he’d told me what he charged, my jaw had dropped; £1,500 was a shocking sum to charge for a spare room, even with its own en suite shower and in a landmark building like ours. “I’ll tell you what’s not fair. The way this government has screwed landlords. Can’t do this, can’t do that, law after law. No sense of the bigger picture.”

“I agree with you on that,” I said, though we both knew he was not a traditional landlord and could earn £7,500 before having to pay any tax. That wasn’t a sum to be sniffed at from where I was standing.

Anyway, back to Pixie. It was four o’clock when I returned from Tesco and came upon a slight young woman on our landing. Assuming she’d arrived early for her viewing, I was about to move past her with a polite nod when something gave me pause. It might have been her natural grace, the way she ran her hand over the polished banister, the rest of her quite still, like a well-born deb about to be presented to court. Or perhaps it was her fashion sense, her orange jumpsuit startling against the old-world dark wood wainscotting. (Think Christine Keeler prowling Cliveden in an astronaut’s costume.)

“Waiting for Alec? I understand there’s stiff competition for the room.”

“Sorry?” She quickly turned to face me, strands of a shining dark bob catching on her lipsticked mouth. Brushing them free, she smiled, her naturally downturned eyes almost closing. “Oh. Well, that’s okay.” Then, playful, “Can I tell you a secret?”

“Of course.” I gave a little giggle. Though not generally a giggler, I seemed to be responding to her childlike, offbeat charm in a completely involuntary way.

“I’m just a time waster. I’ve literally just paid the deposit on another place.” Her eyes flared in mock horror, and I saw now the irises were an uncommon indigo color. “Plus the first six months’ rent.”

“Six months? Is that how it works now?” Perhaps Alec wasn’t such a shark after all.

She shrugged. “I mean, yeah, if you want to beat the rich foreign students. Nearly seven grand I had to find.”

“That’s quite a down payment,” I said.

“I know. I had to get it from my dad.”

“Where’s the flat? In Queens Oak?”

“No, up in New Cross. One of those new blocks by the station? I move in on Saturday. It’s just a studio, but I’ll have it all to myself.” She sighed. I would soon learn she was much given to sighing; it was her preferred form of expression, and this first one was long and sensuous, as if solitude were the most erotic thing in the world (I knew the feeling). “They had, like, forty other applicants, but luckily I had everything right there, ready to go. References, all of it. First time in my life I’ve been organized and, boom, turns out it pays off.”

“Yes, it does,” I said, thinking of my own meticulous bookkeeping. She was holding my gaze with unusual candor, even trust, and I again couldn’t help responding in kind. “If I’ve learned anything in this life, it’s to keep on top of your own affairs, because no one else is going to.”

From behind Alec’s door came his bellowed laughter and a reciprocal burst of titters from the group in there with him. Poor things, I thought, having to laugh at a middle-aged man’s jokes to be in with a chance of having a roof over their heads.

“Is he your landlord as well?” Jumpsuit Girl asked.

“Oh. No. He only lets one room. They’re all two-bedroom flats.” I gestured to my door, directly opposite Alec’s. “I live here.”

“Of course. You must own.”

Because I was old, she meant. She probably thought I was ninety. They all do, these youngsters. The women, anyway. The men don’t think anything at all, just shoulder past without so much as a pardon me, not even actively ill-mannered.

“Lucky you,” she said. “I love this area so much. The square by the station, the pedestrianized bit? It’s like Europe.”

“It is Europe,” I corrected her, but gently because I’d learned never to presume that any young person was cognizant of the continent on which they resided. “Well, I’m sorry we won’t be neighbors. If you’d looked at this one first, it might have worked out differently.”

“Oh, there’s no way I could afford this building,” she said. “Not long-term. This is only one of my porn viewings.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Property porn? Last week I went to see a place in town. That was three thousand a month. Oh my God, it was so amazing. There were these—”

I never did discover what “these” were because at that moment, Alec’s door swung open and he emerged with three women, all in their twenties or early thirties. One was noticeably more attractive than the others, blond and statuesque, and if I’d been having a flutter, she was the one I’d go for. Gentlemen still preferred blondes, if you could classify Alec as a gentleman (I certainly could not, even then).

As the women departed, he turned to my new acquaintance. “Pixie, is it?”

What a perfect name for her, I thought. Whimsical and bewitching. Had it suited her from birth, her parents claiming it for her at first sight, or had she grown into it, adapted her personality to do it justice?

Alec was evidently less charmed. “How did you get in?” he growled. “I didn’t hear the buzzer.”

“Oh, someone was coming out, so I snuck in.”

“Careful, Gwen here will want to message the WhatsApp group about a security lapse like that,” he said, and I threw him an unimpressed look.

“Was that bad?” Pixie said. “I thought I could just piggyback on the next one.”

“There is no next one.” As he made to turn, she stepped toward him, almost theatrically contrite.

“I’m so sorry. I missed my train and the next one was canceled and I didn’t know whether to bother you so I decided to—”

“Fine.” He silenced her with a raised palm. “Since you’re here, come on in.”

“Thank you so much.” She shot a look at me behind his back as if to say, Let’s have some fun, and I hovered for a moment after they’d gone inside, just basking in the mischief of it all. Mischief was an ingredient so long missing from my life that I’d quite forgotten its gorgeous, intoxicating effect.

As far as I’m aware, her inspection of his spare room passed without controversy and so it was that, following the New Cross flat debacle (which I will come to shortly), and having mislaid her mobile, she used a friend’s phone to call the other landlords she’d met during her search. (She later confessed to being in tears on some of the calls, she felt so desperate.)

When Alec didn’t pick up, she left a voicemail, but his returned call was ignored by her friend (as I said, unnecessarily complicated). It was only when her new phone arrived and she was back on social media that she discovered the Instagram message that would upend her life—and mine.

The way she saw it, she had nothing to lose when she replied:

What sort of arrangement?

I assumed I’d never see Pixie again, that she’d installed herself in her New Cross studio while the corporate blonde prepared to take possession of Alec’s spare room, but the very next Saturday, as I was returning from Gail’s with my weekly cinnamon buns, I passed a solid old Škoda double-parked at our entrance and spotted Pixie in the passenger seat. She and the driver, a big-boned young man with tattooed forearms, stepped out and began unloading boxes from the trunk, ferrying them into the building. The boxes hadn’t been taped shut and various items poked out: wooden salad tongs, a sheepskin cushion, a mirror decorated with butterflies, a book titled The Digital Nomad Handbook.

In the lobby, I waved a hand as she approached and was gratified that she recognized me. “Hello again! This looks like a change of plan. What happened to the place in New Cross?”

“Oh.” She drew up next to me and lowered her box to the floor. Clearly there was no short answer. “The flat didn’t exist.”

I frowned. “I don’t understand. You imagined it?”

“No, I mean it existed. It just wasn’t his to rent out. The guy I met? Turned out he’d just rented it himself for a week and was pretending it was his. The whole thing was a scam.”

“What about your deposit? And the six months’ rent?”

Tears rose in her eyes. “Took it and disappeared.”

“Oh!” Talk of such wickedness was very upsetting to me for reasons we’ll discuss later, but I controlled my emotions and looked at her with normal levels of sympathy. “I’ve read about that kind of thing in the papers. They set up fake agencies, don’t they, so it all looks completely aboveboard? You mustn’t blame yourself.”

“I know. Though I did have this weird feeling it was too good to be true.” She turned to address her friend, who was advancing toward us with a large cheese plant in a molding woven pot. “I said that to you, Ash, didn’t I?”

“Yeah.” The young man peered at us from behind a leaf the size of his face. He was a foot taller than Pixie, with smooth skin and longish hair, its shine dulled by a powdery purple rinse. The tattoos on his arms featured a variety of insects, including an oversized beetle on his right wrist. “Could have happened to anyone,” he added.

“How did you find out?” I asked.

“When I went to pick up the keys. I’d arranged to meet the owner in the flat—the fake owner—but when I got there, there was this Italian couple having breakfast. They’d never heard of him. I thought there must have been some mix-up, but we got in touch with the vacation rental company they used, and it was all exactly like they said.”

“The police couldn’t trace the fraudster through his bank details?”

She shrugged. “He’d already withdrawn the money, they said.”

Even though it was only the second time we’d met, I could see she’d been altered by the crime. Aside from the rumpled clothing and disarrayed hair of moving day, she had a raw quality to her now, as if a layer of skin had been scrubbed away. “Reckoned he used a stolen ID to open the bank account in the first place.”

“He’s probably doing the same thing right now with some other flat,” Ash said, transferring the plant pot from one hip to the other like a mother with a toddler. The angle was precarious, a clump of soil in danger of spilling onto the carpet.

“What about your bank? Can they not cover it through their insurance?” I asked.

“I haven’t phoned them yet,” Pixie said. “I wanted to speak to my dad first. I got hold of him last night and he says I’ll never get the money back. Those fraud helplines, it’s all AI, he reckons. Either that or people sitting in bed in their pajamas.”

I chortled. Her dad sounded like our resident misanthrope, Elliot, in flat 7, who had many sharp things to say about Broken Britain on the residents’ WhatsApp group. Pixie’s friend moved on, breathing heavily as he took the stairs, but even though I’d been looking forward to my Gail’s bun all week, I felt strangely reluctant to follow.

“I’m really sorry you’ve had to go through that, but thank God you’ve been able to secure this place instead. Did Alec come down on the rent?”

She looked puzzled. “What d’you mean?”

“I thought you said it was out of your budget?”

And that was before this unfortunate defrauding. Perhaps her father had forked over some money again. I already had the sense that men orbited her in that way you sometimes found with girls who had a quality of fragility, of disorganization. Looks, too, of course. I’ve mentioned her striking eyes, but I ought to also emphasize the almost Slavic loveliness of her face, the fine brow and high cheekbones.

Had she chosen to style herself more conventionally, she’d have been quite the classic beauty.

“Yeah, well. I mean, no, the rent’s the same.” She looked unsettled, distracted by horns in the street: their car was causing congestion.

Ash came jogging back down, his tummy jiggling under his T-shirt. “C’mon, Pix, let’s bring the rest in before I get a ticket.”

“Can I help?” I offered.

“It’s okay,” she said. “We’ve got it. But thanks.”

She probably thought I was too frail to heft boxes, even though I knew I had upper body strength to match hers, thanks to the Older Bodies Pilates I’d been doing weekly for several years. I wondered if Alec was in to welcome her to her new home. If so, then clearly he wasn’t lifting a finger to help. No doubt sitting at his keyboard with his headphones on, creating some mediocre melody no one would ever want to listen to.

But no, that’s naive of me. He’s probably never been more successful, his melodies the soundtrack to a million breathless true-crime fantasies.

After what I’ve seen of folk this last year, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

A little bit about Columbia Mansions. It was—still is, I think you’ll find—a masterwork of Queen Anne architectural symmetry, constructed of identical quarters, each with four floors containing two mirror-image flats that extend from the front of the building to the rear, and distinctive for its extravagance of exterior flourishes. Crested gables, turrets, and chimneys, ornamental brick panels and the like. Each “house” has its own entrance, the recessed double doors painted the same immaculate ivy green, though those at the southern end are known as the “main doors” by virtue of their having the building’s name painted above them, along with the date of its construction: 1896. This is invariably the one to feature in estate agents’ photographs.

And media coverage, of course.

My flat was one of the end units that benefited from a desirable extra aspect of windows, though I was on the second rather than the coveted top floor, and at the less prestigious northern end that overlooks the parking lot. But I genuinely believe that after what happened with my ex-husband, Brian, and the loss of our family home in Surrey, I would have been happy in a single windowless room in that building. All that mattered was that the apartment was mine and mine alone.

Well, technically.

“Daniel,” I called to my thirty-six-year-old firstborn, letting myself in and turning right into the spacious living room at the rear of the flat. “I’ve got the buns!”

“Great,” he called back from his bathroom, where he liked to take epic hot showers.

I wondered if he would be dressed when he surfaced.

In the kitchen (unchanged in the years I’d been here, but there was plenty of life left in its solid pine fittings), I made a pot of coffee, put the buns on plates, and sat at the table I’d salvaged from the Surrey house. It, too, was made of pine and bore a lifetime’s worth of marks and scorings.

A few minutes later, Daniel joined me. He was tall and spare, with dark hair curling over his ears and down his neck and a more handsome face than you’d detect at first glance on account of its rarely being lifted by a smile. He took after my side of the family, a genetic accident for which I felt daily gratitude: the thought of clapping eyes on Brian several times a day via the face across the table was not appealing.

“Did you get me one or two?” he asked. Still depressed but at least dressed was my assessment of him this morning. And not so depressed that he couldn’t wolf down pastries. In spite of his new reclusive lifestyle, he never seemed to gain weight.

“One. They’re almost four pounds each, Dan.” Six months he’d been here and not once had he thought to get off his backside on a Saturday morning and treat me. “Alec’s new lodger’s moving in,” I said between divinely buttery mouthfuls. “Her name’s Pixie.”

“What a stupid name,” he said, chewing.

“I really like it. It suits her.”

“Why, got green skin, has she? What happened to the other one?”

“Yasmin? She and Casper have moved into their own place. Ilford, I think it was.”

“Really? Why would they want to go there? Terrible place.”

Dee, and lots of other women I knew, spoke of their grown-up children as still being their babies. He’ll always be my little boy, they cooed. This was not an experience I related to. Perhaps because Daniel had never been particularly babyish in the first place, not beyond the first year anyway; he’d been too sharp and an early talker. In place of tantrums, he’d had opinions. Now, ever since being ditched by his wife, he voiced those opinions in disdainful abbreviated form.

“What are you up to today?” I asked, and he looked bamboozled, as if I’d challenged him with a quadratic equation. “Got any work to do?”

“Nope.”

He’d left his permanent job as a data analyst a few months before he’d been ousted by Nella and I’d long since ceased viewing the two as coincidental. He did not suit unemployment—sorry, freelancing—and she’d identified that early.

“We could take a long walk?” I suggested.

“Not sure I wanna take a short one.”

“Then perhaps you could vacuum while I’m out? Maybe give your bathroom a clean?”

“And there it is,” he said, raising an index finger in pointless, childish triumph.

My patience snapped. “Daniel, it’s not outrageous to ask you to pull your weight a bit. And could we talk about a contribution to the utilities? My bills have gone through the roof since you’ve been here.” You might assume that a boomer like me would have been mortgage-free by now, but my ex-husband’s destruction of our finances had removed any hope of that, and I remained at the mercy of mortgage lenders and interest rates.

Daniel tilted his head from side to side, weighing up my appeal. “I’m still paying toward the Stoke Newington flat.”

“Then you need to sort that out with Nella. You need to decide who will buy who out. You need your money for yourself.”

He scowled. Need, need, need. He’d always disliked repetition. I wondered for the umpteenth time how my relationship with my children had come to be so troublesome, so lacking in basic affinity—especially when, with a newcomer like Pixie, the sense of kinship could feel natural, immediate. I came to the usual conclusion: you don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as the saying goes. At least they think they are.

“Alec’s getting fifteen hundred pounds a month from his lodger,” I told him.

“The pixie?”

“Just Pixie. There’s no ‘the.’ And he’ll expect her to do her share of chores on top of that, I’m sure.”

“Good for him.”

Bun finished, I got to my feet to take my coffee to the sofa overlooking the communal garden. On the way, I tripped on Daniel’s laptop cable and there was a horrible pulling sensation inside my right knee, which had been acting up as of late. I’d need to monitor it on today’s walk, perhaps even strap it.

He came after me, toeing the cable aside. “I’ll tape it down later.”

Always later, never now. You can’t let him encroach, Mum, Maya had warned when he’d moved in, but encroach he had and I often found myself retreating to my bedroom as if he were the owner and I the “temporary” guest.

Below, Alec had evidently roused himself to give his new roommate a tour of the garden. It was unusually elaborate for a block of this size, with a generous lawn and two picnic areas. English willows and yews were interspersed with more exotic palms and fruit trees, spectacular in all seasons but especially so at this time of year, when summer passed the baton to autumn.

His manner was engaged, I saw, even attentive, and my mind wrested a line from years ago: Tell me what you’re hiding. I tucked it away again.

“Mum? All right if I finish this?”

I broke from my reverie to see Daniel brandishing the coffee jug, a look of sufferance on his face. “Go ahead. But turn the machine off, will you?” He had a habit of returning the empty jug to the hot plate, causing it to scorch. He tutted; even the smallest domestic request prickled him.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve thought that had it not been for his occupancy, we might have avoided the catastrophe ahead, the bloodshed (metaphorically speaking, of course). I could have rescued Pixie from Alec’s clutches earlier and provided safe harbor. It wouldn’t have been ideal, with her enemy still living across the landing, but it could have been a life-prolonging maneuver.

A handbrake turn, if you like—before the car careered off the cliff.

If I’m not what you’re thinking, then neither was Alec. An outlier in the building, he was someone you’d be more likely to find in a loft apartment in Bermondsey or Shoreditch, not low-key suburban Queens Oak. We were quiet-life people here, not spotlight seekers.

. . .