Cosy crime has become a costume party. A tasteful corpse, a charming setting, a few “lovable” suspects, and the reader gets to feel worldly without feeling implicated. Even when the packaging says “dark,” it’s often just cosy with mood lighting—murder as ambience, morality as a puzzle you can solve from the sofa. Liza North writes straight through that cosplay. Her books don’t want to entertain your comfort; they want to expose it.
North comes at thrillers with an academic’s fixation and a journalist’s impatience. You feel it in the way she handles power and plausibility: she’s not here for cute contrivance or hobby-sleuth charm. She’s here for the slow violence of obsession, for the way institutions and friendships and “nice” social rituals turn predatory the second someone needs a scapegoat. She writes with the cold eye of someone who knows how stories are sold—and who gets sacrificed to make them sell.
Obsessed is the clearest statement of intent. This isn’t a dainty whodunnit with Edinburgh scenery doing the flirting for you. It’s a book about the lingering toxicity of first love and the kind of self-mythologising that lets adults keep behaving like teenagers with better excuses. North uses dual timelines to show you the rot in high definition: the past isn’t a warm flashback, it’s the blueprint. Laura’s adulthood isn’t a “fresh start,” it’s a cover story. And when the police start asking questions, North doesn’t give you a clever dance of clues; she gives you the uglier truth—lying as a lifestyle, secrecy as oxygen, desire as a trap you keep stepping into because you’ve convinced yourself it’s fate.
She writes obsession without glamour. That’s rarer than it should be. Too many psychological thrillers treat obsession like a spicy add-on, a way to make betrayal feel sexy. North treats it like a contaminant: it leaks into parenting, into marriage, into memory itself. It makes the narrator unreliable not because she’s “twisty,” but because she’s terrified of what she’ll become if she admits the full story.
Cosy crime flatters the reader into feeling safe; North writes the kind of danger that starts as self-deception and ends as a whole life rearranged around fear.
Then The Weekend Guests takes a premise that could have been pure market bait—old university friends, a stunning coastal house, kids underfoot, champagne and nostalgia—and makes it vicious. North knows exactly what that set-up is designed to do: sell “relatable” middle-class mess with a body dropped neatly into the third act. She refuses the neatness. The friendships aren’t comforting history; they’re old hierarchies kept alive for sport. The children aren’t props; they’re hostages to adult vanity. And the childcare “treat” at the centre of it—the childminder, the promise of one carefree night—becomes the perfect pressure point, because it exposes how entitled these people are to other women’s labour, patience, and silence.
North’s real target is the modern ritual of curated intimacy: the group chat friendships, the reunion weekends, the performative closeness that exists mainly to prove nobody has been left behind. She understands that these gatherings are often less about love than about ranking—who’s thriving, who’s failing, who still matters. Her characters carry that ranking system like a religion, and when it starts to wobble, they don’t become brave; they become cruel.
Her style suits that worldview. She’s not lyrical. She’s insistent. She builds tension through social detail rather than spectacle: the wrong glance held too long, the memory that doesn’t sit still, the way people rewrite the past in real time to keep their self-image intact. The dread arrives like a bill you didn’t want to open—inevitable, specific, and addressed to you. That’s the difference between her work and the cosy-crime industrial product: she doesn’t treat evil as an intruder. She treats it as an outcome.
North’s thrillers don’t ask “who did it?” as a parlour game; they ask “who gets away with it?” as a social policy—because the answer is usually baked in before the crime happens.
And that’s why she leaves bruises. Because she won’t let you pretend the worst people are monsters you’d spot across the room. They’re often educated, charming, funny, exhausted, “good parents,” “loyal friends”—and fully capable of rationalising anything if it protects their position. North writes the comfortable classes the way they deserve to be written: not as aspirational lifestyle, but as a culture of soft coercion, reputation management, and selective empathy.
If the market keeps begging for Scotland—or any setting—to arrive with postcard gloss and comforting genre manners, North’s work is a refusal. She’s not here to give you the snug little shiver of danger-at-a-distance. She’s here to make you sit with the fact that the most socially acceptable lives can still be built on deception, cruelty, and a talent for calling it “complicated.” Don’t ask her for cosy. Read her like you mean it.