ANGELS toppled by OUT

I am still watching Amzaon UK's Bestsellers in Crime, Thrillers & Mystery list and sometime yesterday OUT by Natsuo Kirino took top position from R. J. Ellory's A QUIET BELIEF IN ANGELS which had been there for well over 5 months.

OUT is another of those books that sticks with you, in this case because of the horror of what is perpetrated and because I can't ever imagine being driven to it.

OUT was actually published in 1997 and when I read it three years ago it got my highest rating: 5.0 I think the words below, stored in the trusty database, are from the blurb rather than actually my own.

Translated into English in 2004. In the dreary, exhausting hours of the nightshift at a boxed-lunch factory, four women have formed a friendship of sorts. They work side by side and chat briefly each night, always carefully guarding their troubling thoughts and personal worries. When Yayoi Yamamoto, a young wife and mother, kills her abusive husband, the others help her dispose of the body; however, they become bound to one another in an ever tightening web of conspiratorial intimacy, mutual suspicion, and protective self-interest.

We read it for a face to face discussion group I belong to, and each reported that we did not find it an "easy" read, but at the same time compulsive. My memory is that it is quite a hefty tome.