Critical Incidents

Critical Incidents by Whitehouse, Lucie. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780008268992.

A gripping literary thriller and the first of a new crime series, from the bestselling author of Before We Met. Detective Inspector Robin Osborne 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 working as a benefit-fraud investigator, Robin is caught once again in the cat’s cradle of misunderstanding and resentment that is her relationship with her mother, and 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 to Corinna? 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.