An audio book - 5 hours, which is short. Chapters are in different PoVs - Amy, Nick, Michael, Petra - with an omniscient narrator for flashback chapters. Chapters often end with hints of what's to come - e.g. "Little did I know it at the time, but ..."
A school is burnt down.
Amy (40) used to go to the school. She didn't like it. Nor does her 15 year old son Michael. Her husband Nick liked it. He's clever. He works with computers from home. Their daughter Bella likes school too.
Only after a few chapters do we learn that someone died in the fire. (My guess is that Amy was in some way involved with starting it. Maybe the fire in the prelude wasn't the old fire, but a new one, lit by Michael?)
Michael's flopping exams, so his parents decide to hire a tutor. They hire a very cute 28 y.o. Swede Petra after Michael rejected a 52 year old english woman. Amy's worried that Petra and Nick will get on too well - Nick had an affair 10 years before. Bella's being bullied at school.
Petra fancies Nick. Realising this, he sacks Petra and gets the 52 year-old. Michael is in love, and continues lessons at Petra's flat, paying for them by selling his video games. Petra returns to the house when she knows Nick is alone. She's not really a tutor. She's about to seduce him when Michael returns. (I wonder what Petra's connection to the school fire is.)
In the old time-line we learn that an innocent school girl was charged and was killed in prison.
Amy's sent a photo of a person. We're not told for a few chapters who the person is (a rather artificial tension-builder). It turns out to be the dead girl. Petra knows that Nick has a personal bank account of successful investments and blackmails the couple for £200k. They pay.
3 months later the family celebrate because Michael has scraped passes. The couple still don't know how their secret got out. It dawns on them that it was strange how the search page for tutors had only listed 2 people - Sue and Petra.
In a chapter from Sue's PoV we learn that she was a prison friend of the falsely accused girl. Nick had started the fire and the girl had been framed because she'd bullied Amy, Nick's then girlfriend. Petra was really English Stacie, another inmate. Sue had learnt (and bought) cyber skills (how?), so she could get into Nick's machine, create fake web sites, etc.
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