Human Remains

Human Remains is the Elizabeth Haynes novel that takes a quietly devastating premise (a Kent town in which a slowly increasing number of people are dying alone in their homes and not being found for weeks) and runs it into one of the most carefully observed psychological thrillers of the 2010s. Annabel, the police analyst protagonist, notices the pattern in the data before anyone else does, and her investigation becomes about both the deaths themselves and the particular kind of loneliness epidemic that makes them possible.

What Haynes does with the premise is the right thing. The book alternates between Annabel's investigation and the perspective of a person who has been doing something to make the deaths happen, and the second narrator's voice is one of the more genuinely chilling first-person voices in contemporary crime fiction. The way the two threads converge is structurally precise.

The book is also a serious novel about the social conditions that produce isolation. The supporting cast (Annabel's mother, her professional colleagues, the slowly accumulating list of victims and their families) all carry weight.

Five stars. One of the most quietly important British psychological thrillers of its decade. Recommended without reservation.