Second Life

Second Life by S.J. Watson is a standalone psychological thriller published in February 2015, his second novel following the international phenomenon of Before I Go to Sleep. A top-ten bestseller in the UK on publication, it's a book that comes with an honest caveat: most readers going in as Watson fans will find this a different kind of reading experience from his debut, and the more mixed reception reflects that.

Julia lives a comfortable, orderly life in North London with her surgeon husband Hugh and their adopted teenage son Connor - who is, in fact, her younger sister Kate's biological child. Kate has always been the wilder, less stable sibling, and Julia has spent years quietly managing the distance between Kate's choices and the careful life she's built for Connor. Then Kate is murdered in a Paris alleyway, apparently at random, and the police investigation stalls almost immediately. Julia is left with grief, guilt, and a box of Kate's belongings that, once she opens it, reveals a version of her sister she didn't know: one who had been meeting strangers from online chat rooms across Europe, playing out fantasies with men she knew nothing about.

Julia makes a decision that the novel doesn't entirely endorse. She logs into Kate's profiles, adopts her sister's digital identity, and begins following the same trail - partly to find whoever killed Kate, and partly, the novel gradually suggests, because something in Julia has been waiting for an excuse to do exactly this. The Online Identity vs. Real territory Watson stakes out is the book's most distinctive contribution to the thriller landscape: the gap between the self Julia presents to Hugh and Connor and the woman she's becoming in the dark of her laptop at night, and the question of whether she'll be able to step back from it once she's found what she's looking for.

Julia's Obsession & Desire - for answers, for the man she meets online who calls himself Lukas, for a version of herself she'd buried alongside an earlier, wilder life - gives the novel its genuine psychological tension, even as the pacing demands patience in the early stages. The Complicated Romance with Hugh sits alongside a secret life that Deception makes increasingly difficult to maintain, and the Dark Secrets Kate was keeping are revealed through the disturbing network of connections Julia uncovers.

The Murder Mystery resolves through an Unreliable Narrator dynamic that Watson uses to different effect here than in Before I Go to Sleep: Julia isn't impaired by amnesia but by desire - she sees what she wants to see, ignores what she needs to ignore, and the reader shares her wilful blindness throughout. The Twist Ending and Mystery and Secrets Revealed have divided readers sharply; the ambiguous final pages in particular have drawn strong reactions in both directions.

This is not a book that matches its predecessor's pace or punch, and the comparison it inevitably invites is the main source of reader disappointment. Taken on its own terms - as a slow-burn character study of a woman dismantling her own life in the name of justice for a sister she never fully understood - it has real psychological weight, and warrants its own readership separate from the Before I Go to Sleep fanbase.