THE GRIPPING NEW THRILLER FROM BESTSELLING AUTHOR NICCI FRENCH, shortlisted for the 2023 Ned Kelly Awards for Best International Crime Fiction​ ‘Excels at depicting an ordinary life swept away by horror' Observer ‘Fantastic – a breathless drumbeat of dread and suspense’ Lee Child‘Heart-thumping, head-scratching, nail-biting stuff: The Favour is classic Nicci French.

It then jumps forward over a decade where we find Jude is now working as a doctor in a hospital and planning her wedding to her fiance, Nat. Jude is in a mess, the wedding is off and she doesn't seem to be able to leave well alone getting involved with Liam's commune of friends, hippies? It's been eleven years since they last saw each other but Liam has come to ask a favor and Jude agrees, how could she not?Written during lockdown, this reflects a strange time when stability was fractured and we weren't quite sure how to navigate the present - and that sense of being unmoored creeps through this book to give it an uneasy edge: 3. Now she’s tangled up in his life, the last person to have seen him, and maybe the only one who can uncover the truth about what went wrong—even if she destroys her own life in the process. Opening with narrator Jude telling the story of the car crash that changed her life when she was seventeen, it immediately holds your attention. Even readers who settle on the right perpetrator from the start are unlikely to deduce motive, and will likely be distracted by some convincing red herrings. Unlike Jude - oblivious, indebted and confident - I was a little less trusting and I soon began to detect a few red flags.

That said, THE FAVOUR unfortunately turned out to be one of my least favourite books by the author team, partly because believing the main character’s actions and motivations stretched my ability to suspend disbelief way past its limits. And just when everything seems to have been revealed, there’s a chilling, jaw-dropping twist in the final pages. A Serving of Crime with a Difference - You May Just Discover Something Unique, Different, or Unusual in These 20 Crime Novels.How did patronising, gaslighting Nat know about the incident before the police brought Jude home with her tail between her naive legs? Het moment dat Jude op hem staat te wachten in Norfolk en Liam niet op komt dagen vond ik best spannend. Whilst I struggled with Jude as a main character, I still appreciated the author’s writing style, which I always find refreshing and a bit dreamy and which makes the images come to life in that blurry, slow-motion aspect nightmares are made of (perfect for a mystery). Excels at depicting an ordinary life swept away by horror' Observer ‘Fantastic – a breathless drumbeat of dread and suspense’ Lee Child ‘Heart-thumping, head-scratching, nail-biting stuff: The Favour is classic Nicci French. I guessed the just-before-halfway-twist pretty well straight away, and also correctly identified the killer shortly over the halfway line.

As Jude gets herself more and more enmeshed in what was Liam’s bohemian life, do her choices stretch the bounds of credibility?I had not read any books by Nicci French before, so I was very excited to start, especially as I am a fan of a thrilling read. Liam, was her 'great love', but even she was perturbed when he turned up out of the blue to ask her a huge favour, one that he asked that she tell nobody about.

Medicine is a science, it’s about trouble shooting and problem solving, and it involves logical thought processes. This all started with Liam and Jude when they were young and a car crash that changed everything, bright, ambitious Jude went to medical school, back on the path she had planned. Imagine her surprise when she see's that it's Liam, her boyfriend for a summer when she was 18 years old, the one she has thought of often throughout the years wondering what happened to him.I did find this book a page-turner, as I just had to know what was going to happen and who was involved with what throughout the narrative. Future readers, if you are okay with preposterous and illogical plots then you'll have a better time than I did.