When Lucy Palmer's marriage to Michael ends suddenly, it turns her world upside down. As secrets start to unravel, Lucy leaves London and goes home to live with her elderly parents in the Chilterns. It allows her to look after her parents and to get her head together.

Unlike some of other books of this genre, this book is quite graphic in places and does not make for easy reading. The author is the mother of a popular soap actress, although this is quite irrelevant to the story and her famous daughter only makes an appearance towards the end of the book - how the writer can be seen as 'cashing in' on having a famous relative is beyond me, as they don't even share the same last name.

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The authorities, such as they were at the time and place when all this happened, seem either powerless or uninterested in intervening in domestic affairs. This is not an upsetting brutal man in the full sense of the word as in beatings, so don't be mislead that this may turn your stomach, because it won't. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this, there's great character formation and even though its very character driven I never once lost interest. Yet longueurs aside, this remains an entertainingly readable and well-researched glimpse into a world that fewer and fewer choose to be a part of, and perhaps rightly so. The chastened Pincher and those of his ilk should have heeded the Duke of Wellington’s advice: “Never write a letter to your mistress and never join the Carlton Club.”

Thévoz’s book is at its best when it covers the “eccentricities” of this world. Clubland is, after all, a place where a sign can read “members are asked not to bring their mistresses to dine at the club, unless they are the wives of other members”. Nowhere, he claims, “did bacchanal self-indulgence find greater and more deplorable scope than in the clubs”. It is at its weakest when shifting from droll observance to attempting to make sweeping socioeconomic observations, many of which fail to convince; Thévoz’s claim that early clubs dealt in a kind of “aristocratic protosocialism” feels unlikely. There is, perhaps inevitably, a great deal of repetition between chapters; at times, reading this feels like ploughing through a laundry list of defunct establishments with names such as the Victory Services Club and the Westminster Reform Club. Behind Closed Doors is the first book I've read by Catherine Alliott and I'm so glad I did. An engaging Women's fiction novel I really enjoyed the character driven plot and found it very compelling. There's a great cast of characters in Behind Closed Doors. Lucy's parents and their antics with their friends bring light relief to some of the more intense parts of the story. And when will she get any time to herself and an opportunity to even do anything remotely like changing her life situation. Some might wonder what’s really going on once the dinner party is over, and the front door has closed.Coming face-to-face with her mistakes, Lucy is forced to confront the secrets she's been keeping from herself and those she loves.