#TeamLyons – February 2024 – Critical Incidents – Lucie Whitehouse

Wow! This book was really unputdownable, and gave me a couple of ridiculously late nights. So here’s the lowdown…

Robin Lyons, sacked in disgrace from the Met for disobeying her superior’s orders and allowing a suspected murderer to go free, has been forced to move back to her hometown of Birmingham and her parents’ home with her thirteen year old daughter. Fiercely independent since leaving home for UCL and managing an unplanned pregnancy in her final year (with the support of her best friend Corrina), her life seems to be finally going the way she’d always planned until her ignominious departure from the Met.

Butting heads with her mother from her arrival, with her father acting as peacemaker, as well as the smugness of her brother Luke, there’s nowhere she’d like to be less. Working for her mother’s friend Maggie, whose bread-and-butter work is investigating benefit fraudsters and insurance cheats, she feels like she couldn’t have fallen any further from running her own homicide squad.

But Maggie has other work, referred to her by an old police friend – in this case, the disappearance of a young local woman, whose case they take on as she’s not regarded as a minor or vulnerable by the police so they won’t investigate.

Also, within a day of her arrival home she discovers Corrina, her best friend since childhood, has died in a house fire, with her husband missing, presumed responsible. But Robin can’t square this situation with the Josh she’d known since her teenage years. Unable to let the local police investigate alone, she launches her own enquiry into what could have happened – after all, she knows the couple and their son – now seriously ill
in intensive care, having leapt from a window to escape the fire – better than anyone.

This is a beautifully complex case, and everything in the book is highly satisfying: the difficulty of returning to her parents after spending most of her life living independently; the feeling of having let her daughter down by taking her from the home, city and school she loved; the catching up with old schoolfriends; seeing the changes in her home city; and with some seriously witty comments to lighten the load – Robin has a wonderfully dry sense of humour. The whole thing works beautifully, with plenty of twisty surprises, a highly realistic and diverse supporting cast, and, of course, the crucial tense denouement!

This is a departure for Whitehouse, who prior to this was writing superior psychological thrillers in what has since become a saturated market. The change of genre demonstrates that she is a highly skilled writer who could probably turn her hand to any market – but the good news for police procedural fans is that this is the beginning of a new series, and that we will get to spend more time with the headstrong Robin, her daughter Lennie et al – to which I can only say: Hurrah!

One to definitely put on the “must read as soon as possible” list!

With thanks to Compulsive Readers for inviting me to participate in this blog blast, and to 4th Estate for the ARC. This has not influenced my opinion and this is an honest review.

Author Lucie Whitehouse

BLURB: Detective Inspector Robin Lyons is going home.

Dismissed for misconduct from the Met’s Homicide Command after refusing to follow orders, unable to pay her bills (or hold down a relationship), she has no choice but to take her teenage daughter Lennie and move back in with her parents in the city she thought she’d escaped forever at 18.

In Birmingham, sharing a bunkbed with Lennie and navigating the stormy relationship with her mother, Robin works as a benefit-fraud investigator – to the delight of those wanting to see her cut down to size.

Only Corinna, her best friend of 20 years seems happy to have Robin back. But when Corinna’s family is engulfed by violence and her missing husband becomes a murder suspect, Robin can’t bear to stand idly by as the police investigate. Can she trust them to find the truth of what happened? And why does it bother her so much that the officer in charge is her ex-boyfriend – the love of her teenage life?

As Robin launches her own unofficial investigation and realises there may be a link to the disappearance of a young woman, she starts to wonder how well we can really know the people we love – and how far any of us will go to protect our own.