Rosa Williams watches her husband leave the house on her phone. The police have asked to see the doorbell footage, so she scrolls back past her own return from an early yoga class to the clip of Daniel at 6.50, pulling the door behind him, patting a pocket for his keys, glancing once up at the bedroom window before he walks to the car. Later, alone, she plays it again and zooms in until his face breaks into pixels, looking for something in his eyes that she is afraid she will find. It Ends Here by Heidi Perks is built from moments like that one, in which someone studies the person they love most and cannot read him.
Everyone Outside Is Under Suspicion Too
The situation is simple to state. On a cold Monday on the Isle of Wight, a shot is fired inside The Boatyard, a café at the end of a single lane on Port Marina near Newport. A waitress and four early customers are locked in, the shutters are down, and as the hours pass the police come to believe the person with the gun is not a stranger who walked in off the street but somebody inside that room. The detectives then do what detectives do. They knock on doors and ask the families whether the person they love has been depressed, secretive or strange.
That is where It Ends Here by Heidi Perks finds its subject. A crime novelist’s wife, a waitress’s grandmother, a London wife and an influencer’s husband are pulled to the cordon, and each of them must defend someone while privately building a case against them. Short sections from inside the café, spoken by the person holding the gun, run between their chapters, but they mainly serve to tighten the screw on everyone waiting outside.
The isolation helps. In March the marina is half asleep, its outdoor tables roped together for winter, and the only people about are boat owners who like an empty morning. By lunchtime a crowd has gathered at the barrier with phones held up, filming nothing, and Perks is sharp about how quickly a family’s worst day becomes somebody else’s content. The island sits across the Solent from the lead detective’s desk in Southampton, so for the first hours the case is run from a ferry and a laptop while the relatives arrive by car with nothing but rumours from a football team’s group chat.
What the Husbands Did Not Say
Gareth Lombard’s morning is the quiet masterpiece of the book. He checks his wife’s Instagram account in the car every day, because her posts of matching polo shirts and gifted flowers are the most reliable way he has of knowing what her days contain. He is queueing for the mainland ferry when the school rings: his son has been sick in class and his wife is not answering. Then his mother-in-law tells him Eleanor dropped the boys at her house to go for a run, which she never does. Then a soft-voiced woman called Violet rings, puzzled, because Eleanor has missed her Monday appointment, and it emerges that Eleanor has been seeing a counsellor every week for six months. Gareth knew none of it. Perks lets him stand in his own garden and take it out on the shed, and the scene says more about a marriage than a dozen arguments would. It is the point at which It Ends Here by Heidi Perks stops reading like a siege novel and starts reading like a study of what couples choose not to say over breakfast.
Liv Hamilton’s thread runs in counterpoint. She has just learned she is pregnant, in the bathroom of a Covent Garden restaurant, when a detective calls to say her husband’s car is parked on an island he claims to hate, when he had told her he would be at a business meeting. Her shift from terror to suspicion takes a single car journey, and the novel is honest about how quickly love can produce a plausible affair out of almost nothing.
Not every thread is as rich. Rosa is written mostly as a bundle of nerves, and she spends a little too long walking up and down the same stretch of road. Still, her doubt is the most painful one in It Ends Here by Heidi Perks, because she has the least evidence and the most to lose.
Heidi Perks and the Grandmother Who Refuses to Wait
The best character in the novel is seventy-eight, has a walking stick and a cat called Plum, and is dying. Ede Hogan raised her granddaughter Jennie after Jennie’s mother drank herself to death, and when the police arrive she is in the middle of an argument with her about the end of her own life. Her neighbour Marjorie, booming and nosy, provides the novel’s only reliable comedy, at one point looking thrilled to be in a real-life murder club.
Ede is also the book’s sharpest thinker. Herded into a room with the other families, she tells them, more or less, that a spouse only ever meets the finished version of a person, while she has known her girl since the day she was born. It is a cruel thing to say to frightened strangers, and it is the thesis of It Ends Here by Heidi Perks in a single speech. Nobody in that room, Ede included, comes out of the last third with their certainties intact.
Heidi Perks Lets the Middle Drift
The trouble comes between late morning and lunchtime. With the families assembled and no contact from inside, the novel repeats its central beat: another call, another discovered lie, another bout of doubt. The confrontation in that shared room, staged by a detective who openly hopes the relatives will turn on each other, feels arranged for the plot rather than arising from it. When the story behind the siege finally emerges, much of it arrives as speeches inside the café, and one person in that room never becomes more than a smirk with a temper.
There is also a loose end. A school counsellor’s chapters, whose purpose is better discovered than described, introduce a student in real danger and then leave her hanging, which is a strange choice in a book so concerned with responsibility. Readers should know that the novel carries grief, addiction, terminal illness and violence, all handled without sensationalism.
None of this sinks it. Perks keeps her prose plain and her chapters short, and the final hour, which jumps between the cordon and the room, is as tense as anything she has written. The coda, set a month later, is the most mature part of It Ends Here by Heidi Perks: nobody is forgiven, and nobody is quite condemned.
After the Last Page
This is a novel for readers who like their suspense domestic and their villains hard to place. Those who want more ordinary people pushed into extraordinary lies should try Getting Away With Murder by Shari Lapena, while The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley offers another coastal setting in which everyone is watching everyone else. Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies remains the model for school-gate marriages coming apart under pressure, and it pairs well with Gareth’s chapters in particular.
It Ends Here by Heidi Perks begins with a woman staring at a frozen image of her husband’s face, and it ends by asking what she would have seen if she had known where to look.