#BlogTour ‘Risk Of Harm’ by Lucie Whithouse

About the book…

The gripping new crime thriller from the bestselling author of ‘Before We Met’ and ‘Critical Incidents’

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

My huge thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours and 4th Estate Books for the blogtour invite, and gifted review copy of ‘Risk Of Harm’ which is published on 8th July!

You don’t need to have read ‘Critical Incidents’ in order to appreciate ‘Risk Of Harm’, but I would suggest that anyway because it is a bloody good book. Where Lucie works so well is in the realism of the dialogue, it just jumps off the page and supports the plot in racing it forwards. It is difficult to put it down once you have started it so apologies to my family for my cack handed cooking and slightly more than usual slapdash-ness in the parenting stakes, I had an occupied hand!

This is a book you want to finish and yet savour, you find yourself getting paper cuts flipping the pages and then , warning yourself to slow down , because you will finish it too quickly.

Robin is a single parent, a DCI with a chequered past, complex love life and a great line in witty banter that belies her razor sharp intuitive detective skills. Her daughter, Lennie, is the apple of her eye and there is nothing she won’t do for the fiercely independent and uber bright teen. Robin’s job is protecting the public and bringing criminals to justice, but her motivation is in keeping danger far away from her daughter.

The intricacies and complications of juggling family life, working for a boss who happens to be your ex, and being seen as a legitimate, hard working member of the squad are so well realised, especially the way Robin has returned from London to Birmingham, there is the perceived notion that she is ‘settling’ or running back home after failing in the Big Smoke.

Birmingham itself rears up as a character in its own right, this is very much a novel with a cantered identity against which the story of  multicultural factions , riled against each other by a politician with an ulterior motive, runs alongside a murder investigation which Robin is in charge of. The notion of a young woman being murdered, dumped in an abandoned emblem to Birmingham’s industrial past like a piece of discarded ephemera, is touchingly rendered. As Robin tries to establish an identity, as well as a timeline to the murder, she has a city on the verge of boiling over and then, a second victim turns up…will there be more? Or will Robin and her team catch the perpetrator in time?

There wasn’t anything I didn’t enjoy about ‘Risk Of Harm’. Life is a condition with perpetual danger of being damaged, both physically and emotionally, and , we all take risks with ourselves and those we love.

It’s a fascinating study of how far people go to achieve their goals, specifically, engendering hatred towards those who are not white. It’s a timely topic to tackle given the events of recent days and , just as in real life, the way that ordinary people behave has raised hopes of good being done in the face of evil, this is a novel which does not let up until a satisfying conclusion is achieved.

About the author…

Lucie Whitehouse was born in the Cotswolds in 1975 and grew up in Warwickshire. She studied Classics at Oxford University and then began a career in publishing while spending evenings, weekends and holidays working on the book that would eventually become ‘The House At Midnight’.

Having married in 2011, she now divides her time between the UK and Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband. She writes full time and has contributed features to the Times, the Sunday Times, the Independent, Elle and Red Magazine.

Twitter @RandomTTours @LWhitehouse5 @4thEstateBooks