Hope to Die

Cara Hunter

Average Rating 7/10 (1 Review)

DI Adam Fawley - Book 6

Midnight.
A call out to an isolated farm on the outskirts of Oxford.
A body shot at point-blank range in the kitchen.

It looks like a burglary gone wrong, but DI Adam Fawley suspects there's something more to it.

When the police discover a connection to a high-profile case from years ago, involving a child's murder and an alleged miscarriage of justice, the press go wild.

Suddenly Fawley's team are under more scrutiny than ever before. And when you dig up the past, you're sure to find a few skeletons...

The sixth twisty, up-all-night thriller from the Sunday Times bestselling Cara Hunter.

'One of the finest crime writers we have.'

'A mystery that is both satisfying and surprising.'

Review by Ben Macnair (030625) Rating (7/10)

Review by Ben Macnair
Book Source: Not Known
Rating 7/10
Hope to Die is one of those Crime novels that starts of as one thing, but then quickly becomes another.

It starts with a seeming break in at a lonely and isolated house on the outskirts of Oxford. There is a body in the kitchen, shot at point blank range. The householders, The Swanns, are elderly and don’t know who the dead man is, or what he wanted from them.

Luckily Detective Inspector Adam Fawley is on the case, and his many years of experience means he is not so quick to dismiss the case. The Swann’s daughter was murdered, and they moved to their new home to escape the press intrusion and to try to rebuild their lives.

As the team dig deeper into the householders, their history, why they had a gun on the premises, and their link to the dead man things are far from what they first appeared to be.

There are twists in the story that we don’t see coming, but they all make sense. The story is simply plotted, but it allows for different sub-plots to be developed. Adam Fawley is a strong character, and the team around him are loyal and seem to want to get the job done. Although there are many strands in the story, they are easily separated, and let the story unwind in its own way.

The story is told in emails, through texts and through police transcripts, through different characters adding and changing their stories as they go along. The final twist is one we don’t see coming and although the work of the team is never finished, and one case can hang over the next one there is a strange sense of finality to this one, of a crime and its many effects finally being put to bed.
Ben Macnair (3rd June 2025)