Barbara Abel

Abel is Belgian, was an actor first, and writes psychological thrillers in French that mostly take place between neighbours. Mothers' Instinct puts two families in adjoining gardens and a child's death between them, and what one mother comes to believe about the other drives everything after. It has been filmed twice, in French and then in English with Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway. She has published more than a dozen novels, several of them about the ordinary machinery of suspicion inside a family, and she is widely read in France and Belgium without much of an English readership.