The Loyal Servant

I’ll admit, I side-eyed the premise at first—another ‘ordinary woman in over her head’ thriller? But *The Loyal Servant* subverts the trope by making Caroline’s ordinariness the point. Hudson doesn’t let her off the hook. Caroline isn’t accidentally brilliant; she’s *willfully* ignorant, a woman who’s spent years filing away ethical dilemmas under ‘not my problem’ until the body in her boss’s office forces her to dig them up. The novel’s first act is almost oppressively mundane—emails about procurement, snide comments from colleagues—but that’s the trap. By the time the stakes escalate, you’re as invested in Caroline’s petty workplace grudges as her life-or-death choices. Hannah Curtis’s performance sells this transformation. Her narration starts clipped and exhausted, the vocal equivalent of a woman who hasn’t slept since 2016. But as Caroline’s facade cracks, Curtis lets the panic seep in—not in screams, but in the way her voice thins on words like ‘protocol’ and ‘plausible deniability.’ My only critique? The middle act sags slightly under the weight of Caroline’s introspection. A few more scenes with the delightfully slimy press secretary (Curtis *nails* his smarm) could’ve tightened the momentum. And while the ending lands with a gut punch, the final twist relies a touch too much on withheld information. Still, this is a thriller that lingers precisely because it feels *real*—the kind of story that’ll make you eye your own inbox with suspicion.