#TeamLyons – Last Witness – Lucie Whitehouse

We’re now at book three in this series…

And I’m pretty gutted that that’s it thus far, until Lucie Whitehouse continues the series! (Let’s hope she’s a fast writer!) It’s another great, complex storyline with an ending that knocked me for six – I’m generally not bad at seeing what’s coming, but this book was full of surprises!

The murder victim is a young man, Ben Renshaw,. He left his home the evening before his body was discovered, and he’s found in sprawling woods which are generally deserted in the evening, apart from drug dealers meeting customers, and romantic assignations. He’s known to the police, not because he’s been in trouble, but because he and his best friend Theo gave evidence in a case against a fellow student at their prestigious private school called Alistair Heywood. As a result he was found guilty of raping their friend Molly and given a lengthy prison sentence. DCI Robin Lyons lands the job of finding his killer.

Ben and Theo’s brave decision resulted in a campaign of terrifying violence against them and their families, resulting in Theo being a victim of a hit-and-run, leaving his leg badly damaged. As the Heywoods are a powerful and rich family, the assumption is that they are responsible – but proof is impossible to find. Ben, Theo and Molly set up an online campaign, StrengthInNumbers.com, and give talks encouraging other victims of sexual violence to speak about their experiences on their supportive website. Ben’s charisma makes him the natural leader, and their forum gets plenty of media attention – something he clearly enjoys.

So is his murder a case of the Heywoods getting the ultimate revenge? Or is there more to this murder? When another death occurs, and that case is also given to Robin, she quickly feels the pressure to make arrests.

However, as is always the case with Robin, her family life is difficult – her brother Luke is on remand for a crime committed in the previous book, and her daughter Lennie is becoming increasingly withdrawn (I’m trying to avoid spoilers for those who haven’t read the previous book – but I do urge you to read them all, although this can be read as a standalone novel.) One of the strengths of this series is the attention given to the family, as well as the investigation. Every character is well-drawn and believable. Robin still has the complication of her feelings for Samir, her first love who is now her immediate superior. When she doubts herself, he encourages her to believe in her skills as a detective, which is something she – and her team -have in spades.

The investigation naturally leads them in unexpected directions, without feeling forced or inauthentic. It’s a fantastically original series, and Robin is a likeable but realistically flawed lead character. It also has plenty of amusing lines, to lighten the atmosphere. This series deserves – albeit based on just three books so far – to be as successful as any detective series I’ve ever read. It’s one of those books one rushes to return to, and I read it all within two or three days. The pace never flags – it’s compelling throughout. As for the ending – well, let’s just say I had a very late night, unable to put it down until I knew the full story! Please, Lucie, may we have some more…?

crimeworm Verdict: An absolute must-read for fans of quality police procedurals!

With thanks to Compulsive Readers for the blog tour invitation, and 4th Estate books for the ARC. This has not affected my opinion, and this is an honest review.

Author Lucie Whitehouse

BLURB: One murder, three families destroyed
And a detective guilty of a crime of her own

When 18-year-old Ben Renshaw is found dead in city woodland, DCI Robin Lyons is plunged into one of Birmingham’s most controversial cases.

Months earlier, Ben and his best friend gave testimony that sent a former classmate, Alistair Heywood, to prison for a vicious sexual assault. Before the trial, the boys and their families endured months of brutal witness intimidation, for which the Heywoods, a privileged and influential local family, faced no legal repercussions. Instead, they vowed revenge.

Is Ben’s murder the fulfilment of that vow, the beginning of a bloody new chapter that will go on claim lives on all sides? Or is the truth – as the Heywoods claim – something entirely different?

To solve the case, Robin has to negotiate the city’s networks of power while walking a dangerous line: her own daughter, Lennie, has a secret that could threaten her liberty – and, if it comes out, Robin’s, too. Before long, Robin comes to question whether she knows what justice is at all.

#TeamLyons – Risk of Harm – Lucie Whitehouse

This is rapidly becoming a favourites amongst my recently discovered detective series – it is so good! I absolutely flew through this book, reading more or less straight on from the first in the series, Critical Incidents, and finishing this in less than two days (which is very fast for me, not the speediest of readers!)

Now, we ended the first book with Robin Lyons at a crossroads, with two job opportunities open to her: should she return to her old job in London, the city she and her daughter Lennie lived in for so long and loved so much? Or should she remain in her childhood home in Birmingham, to which she had returned after being forced out of the Met in disgrace? With her parents getting older, and the opportunity of a step-up to a DCI position, she decides to remain in Birmingham, under the command of Samir, her first love, who remains a good friend.

She’s quickly flung into her first murder case, leading the investigation of a girl stabbed to death. She’s in her late teens/early twenties, found in an abandoned factory by an urban explorer, wrapped in an old piece of carpet. They have nothing with which to identify her: no purse, tattoos, or scars; her clothes are utterly anonymous, easily available on any high street in the UK. But someone must recognise her, surely, so they put together a picture of how she would have looked alive, and wait for the calls to come in…except they don’t…

A few days later they have another stabbed girl – Birmingham is in the midst of a knife crime epidemic – just ten minutes walk away from their Jane Doe. This girl is easier to identify – she lives nearby, and was presumably on her way home when attacked. But are the two victims linked? Are they dealing with one murderer, or two? They are both Robin’s cases, and the press do their best to suggest they could be dealing with a possible serial killer, putting added pressure on Robin. They also drag her past mistakes in London into things, as well as the fact she has a new love interest…well, not entirely new; someone from her past…

Meanwhile, her irksome brother Luke is – predictably – causing trouble. He hasn’t changed, constantly needling Robin about the fact that, because she’s had more career success than him, she thinks she’s better than him. When his partner Natalie suggests a trial separation and he loses the plot, Robin reluctantly comes to his rescue – but he isn’t remotely grateful; in fact, the very opposite…

I really enjoy the way the whole Lyons family are included in the book, and the scenes involving them are just as compelling as the police investigation. Robin’s previously fit and relentlessly organised mother becomes ill, and Robin sees a vulnerable side to her mother she’d never seen previously, which forces her to rethink their previously prickly relationship. In fact, throughout this book Robin is made to rethink a lot of opinions she’d previously cast in stone.

There’s also a great deal of racial tension in the city, whipped up by a particularly nasty right-wing vlogger, Ben Tyrell. This all comes to a head with confrontational marches between his right-wing supporters, versus students and other, more reasonably-minded people.

Lingering throughout the book is the mystery of the first victim, and who she can possibly be – after all, if you know nothing about the victim then how can you possibly find out who would want her dead?

This is a fabulous read – possibly even better than the first in the series, now that Robin’s established back in Birmingham permanently and her and Lennie have their own flat, with her daughter growing up quickly. All the characters are believable and three-dimensional, and it has some very witty lines to lighten both the stress of the investigation and the racial conflict in the city. I found the twist in the tale incredibly satisfying, as well as a little bit scary. Like me, I defy you to be able to put this book down once you start reading! Roll on the next in the series…

Final verdict: A superbly written modern police procedural with a chilling twist!

With thanks to Compulsive Readers for the blog tour invitation and 4th Estate Books for the ARC. This has not affected my opinion, and this is an honest review.

Author Lucie Whitehouse

BLURB: Robin Lyons is back in her hometown of Birmingham and now a DCI with Force Homicide, working directly under Samir, the man who broke her heart almost twenty years ago.

When a woman is found stabbed to death in a derelict factory and no one comes forward to identify the body, Robin and her team must not only hunt for the murderer, but also solve the mystery of who their victim might be.

As Robin and Samir come under pressure from their superiors, from the media and from far-right nationalists with a dangerous agenda, tensions in Robin’s own family threaten to reach breaking point. And when a cold case from decades ago begins to smoulder and another woman is found dead in similar circumstances, rumours of a serial killer begin to spread.

In order to get to the truth Robin will need to discover where loyalty ends and duty begins. But before she can trust, she is going to have to forgive – and that means grappling with some painful home truths.

#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.