Why We Die is the third in the four-book series featuring Zoë Boehm, a private investigator living in Oxford.
The prologue is scary. It’s about a body in a coffin. The body is still alive, it’s a ‘she’ and she’s banging on the sides and the top while shouting for help. The body is not named. If it’s our intrepid private investigator, she will have to be rescued as we know there’s a fourth book in the series.
Why We Die involves the chance meeting of Tim Whitby and Katrina Blake when Katrina sits at Tim’s table in a restaurant as all other tables are taken. Tim is handsome and Katrina is attractive. Nothing further happens … at that time.
A week or so later, Harold Sweeney’s jewellry business is robbed. He asks Zoë to investigate. She is to report back to him once she knows the names of the perpetrators. Under no circumstances should she inform the police.
She discovers that Arkle and Trent, Katrina’s brothers-in-law, carried out the robbery. Unfortunately, Sweeney has disappeared. Zoë has not been paid.
There’s at least one murder; an ex-policeman who’s a nuisance; a mention of domestic violence; and quite a few altercations. There’s also an elderly gentleman who is ‘away with the fairies’ most of the time. He does, however, prevent Zoë’s being killed during one of his lucid interludes.
Fans are aware of Herron’s tendency to take his time setting the scene and to impart extraneous information that impedes progress. Readers who stay the distance will be rewarded when the plot heats up, There’s a major development close to the end that few will see coming. I didn’t.
Book review by Clive Hodges
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mick Herron is a bestselling and award-winning novelist and short story writer, best known for his Slough House thrillers. The series has been adapted into a TV series starring Oscar-winning actor Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb.
In 2008, inspired by world events, Mick began writing the Slough House series, featuring MI5 agents who have been exiled from the mainstream for various offences. The first novel, Slow Horses, was published in 2010. Some years later, it was hailed by the Daily Telegraph as one of “the twenty greatest spy novels of all time”.
The Slough House novels have been published in 20 languages; have won both the CWA Steel and Gold daggers; have been shortlisted for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year four times; and have won Denmark’s Palle Rosenkrantz prize. Mick is also the author of the highly acclaimed novels Reconstruction, This is What Happened and Nobody Walks.
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