Heightened thriller plots frequently rub shoulders with compassionate portraits of ordinary lives in the work of Joanna Cannon. But while her bestselling debut, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, successfully used a resident’s disappearance to tease out a community’s secrets, the crime thriller element in her latest novel skews much darker, upsetting the balance.

Police are hunting a serial killer who is strangling women, while in the past, a horrific accusation ends in tragedy.

Our guide to both timeframes is the slippery narrator Linda, who lives in a modest house on a sprawling suburban estate, works part-time in the local charity shop and is unhappily married to boorish, belittling factory worker Terry. Linda is eerily reminiscent of Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant. Both are lonely outsiders who wildly misread social cues, with a traumatic backstory, an overbearing mother, unhealthy obsessions and a love for crosswords.

Cannon’s novel is most engaging when it focuses on the details of Linda’s everyday struggles, elevating the kind of person whom we might otherwise judge, ridicule or overlook altogether.

Hers is a strictly limited life: she hardly uses the internet, never travels further than the city centre and envies the beautiful, moneyed people in glossy catalogues.

However, Cannon also bombards us with breadcrumbs for her mysteries: the identity of the murderer, Terry’s suspicious behaviour, the significance of former resident Rebecca, what happened to make Linda flee Wales, and why she ends up in some kind of institution. I tired of women’s dead bodies being relegated to mere background props, while Linda’s mental health became part of a flurry of climactic twists – some satisfying, some very dubious. A tidy ending? Yes, but at the cost of human complexity.

A Tidy Ending is published by Borough at £16.99. To order your copy for £14.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk