There is a particular kind of dread that lives on a quiet, expensive street. Everyone is polite. Every front door is freshly painted. And nobody, absolutely nobody, wants you looking too closely. That is the queasy social pressure Catherine Steadman builds her sixth novel on, and it works because most of us have stood on a pavement at dusk, caught a lit window across the road, and wondered what the people inside are actually like.
Nine Lives by Catherine Steadman hands that low-grade nosiness a weapon: a camera, strapped to a cat.
The Setup: One Cat, One Collar, One Very Bad Idea
Frankie Green arrives at her box-fresh London terrace carrying the wreckage of a recent divorce, a redundancy payout, and Blue, the Persian cat she kept from the marriage. She is forty, newly single, a little out of her financial depth among neighbours who seem to own two houses each, and trying very hard to become a calmer, glossier version of herself. Then Blue slips out one night and comes home with two words gouged into his collar: HELP ME.
Most of us would invent a tidy explanation and move on. Frankie does the opposite. She digs out an old “cat cam” collar, clips it on, and lets Blue do what cats do, which is wander into other people’s homes. What she sees on the footage cannot be unseen, and from there the story tips from harmless snooping into something far darker.
It is a clever hook, and Steadman knows it. The cat does the trespassing so Frankie’s hands stay clean, which lets the reader feel the same guilty thrill she does. You are not breaking in. You are just watching.
A Narrator Worth Following
What keeps the early chapters alive, before the plot bares its teeth, is Frankie herself. Steadman writes her in close, present-tense first person, full of dry asides about transparent bin bags, neighbourhood WhatsApp groups, and the unspoken rules of a street where the gardeners outnumber the residents. She is lonely without being pitiable, sharp without being cruel, and very funny about her own poor decisions even while she makes them.
That voice is the engine of the first half. Frankie’s class anxiety, her raw post-divorce nerve endings, and her habit of Googling everyone she meets all read as recognisably human. You like her, which matters, because you need to follow her into choices you would never make yourself.
The Cat Camera as More Than a Gimmick
Plenty of writers would have used the spy-cam as a throwaway device. Steadman turns it into a formal experiment. The footage chapters, simply titled “Cat Camera,” are written as silent video: no sound, a low grass-level view, the picture jolting as the animal moves, Blue’s chin bobbing at the top of the frame. It reads like watching security footage with the audio cut, and that silence carries a surprising amount of the tension. You see mouths move and cannot hear the words, which is its own quiet horror.
These sections are inventive and genuinely fresh. They are also, in fairness, the most divisive thing here. Some readers love the cinematic switch; others find the cat’s-eye view a touch too cute for such grim material. Your reaction will depend on how much whimsy you can take sitting beside your menace.
Structure and Pace: A Deliberate Slow Burn
The story unfolds across nine days, counted off like a clock running down, with the title’s promise of nine lives’ worth of twists hanging over every chapter. Around that spine, Steadman threads a second timeline that fills in the history of what Blue stumbles upon, plus a few chapters that step outside Frankie’s head entirely.
Honesty matters here. The book is a slow burn, and not everyone will love the burn rate. The first half cares more about mood, character, and the slow tightening of unease than about fast action. The payoff does arrive, and when it does the final third becomes very hard to set down, but you have to sit in the discomfort for a while first. Anyone hoping for a sprint from page one may get restless; anyone who enjoys dread that builds will feel well looked after.
Where the Book Wobbles
A four-star thriller earns its missing star somewhere, and this one has a few soft spots worth naming plainly.
- Several neighbours feel built to function rather than to live, planted mainly to point suspicion in the wrong direction, then quietly shelved.
- The backstory chapters that explain the central crime do not always carry the emotional weight the climax asks of them; the motive lands more as plot than as person.
- A handful of Frankie’s decisions require a generous reading of how a frightened, otherwise sensible woman would behave.
- The cat-eye footage device, charming as it is, occasionally strains the realism the rest of the book works to keep.
None of this sinks the novel. It does keep it from greatness. The parts are strong on their own; the join between the human drama and the thriller machinery is where you feel the stitching.
What Hides Behind the Pastel Front Doors
For all its twists, the question at the heart of Nine Lives by Catherine Steadman is privacy in an age when most of us are a little bit Frankie. We follow strangers’ lives through glowing rectangles every night. We assume the people with the prettiest kitchens have the prettiest lives. Steadman pokes at that assumption hard, and the uneasy pleasure of the book is how willingly it implicates the reader. You disapprove of Frankie’s spying right up until you cannot stop turning pages to see what she films next.
It is a smart, modern reworking of the Rear Window idea, dressed in costly North London paint and powered by the surveillance tools sitting in all our pockets.
A Quick Word on the Author
Catherine Steadman is an actress turned novelist; you may have known her face from period drama before you knew her name on a spine. Her debut, Something in the Water, was a Reese’s Book Club pick and a runaway bestseller, and she has built a steady run of twisty standalones since. If you want to read around this one, her own backlist is the obvious next stop.
- Something in the Water (the breakout, and still many readers’ favourite)
- Mr. Nobody
- The Disappearing Act
- The Family Game
- Look in the Mirror (her most recent before this)
If You Liked This, Read These Next
Readers who click with the voyeur-next-door premise will find close cousins here.
- The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, for the unreliable watcher on the outside of other people’s lives.
- The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn, for housebound surveillance and shaky perception.
- The Other Woman by Sandie Jones, for a too-perfect social circle with something rotten underneath.
- You by Caroline Kepnes, for obsession rendered uncomfortably charming.
- Behind Closed Doors by B. A. Paris, for polished façades hiding domestic horror.
The Verdict
Nine Lives by Catherine Steadman is a sharp, original, slightly uneven thriller with one of the best hooks of the year and a narrator you are glad to spend nine tense days beside. It asks for a little patience in its first half and a little forgiveness in its plotting, then repays both with a propulsive finish and a final sting that recasts much of what came before. If you like your suspense domestic, your protagonist quick-witted, and your premise unlike anything else on the shelf, Nine Lives by Catherine Steadman has earned its place on the nightstand. Just maybe check your cat’s collar before you switch off the light.
