Critical Incidents – Lucie Whitehouse #TeamLyons Book 1

Detective Inspector Robin Lyons 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 navigating the stormy relationship with her mother, Robin works as a benefit-fraud investigator – to 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? 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.

Book Information: 401 pages. Publisher: Fourth Estate. Publication Date: 18th April 2019

My thoughts:

Critical Incidents is the first book in a series featuring DI Robin Lyons and I am delighted to be taking part in a blogtour promotion reading each book in this series over the course of the next few months. My thanks to Orion and Fourth Estate for my copies of the books.

So, let’s have a look at Critical Incidents: Set in London and Birmingham, we meet Detective Inspector Robin Lyons. Recently fired from the Metropolitan Police’s Homicide Department for not being able to follow orders, she and her teenage daughter Lennie are forced to return home to Birmingham to move back in with her parents.

Having always had a difficult relationship with her mother, Robin doesn’t plan on staying in Birmingham for long, just long enough to get back on her feet financially and hopefully get re-instated with the Met. In the meantime, she and daughter Lennie have to shared her cramped childhood bedroom, sleep in bunkbeds and bite her tongue until she is able to get away. It also doesn’t help that Lennie has had to leave her private school and friends mid-term and enrol in the rough local comprehensive and Robin is temporarily working as a benefit-fraud investigator for her mother’s best friend.

The only glimmer of hope in this sorry situation it that Robin’s BFF, Corinna, her husband and young son still live in Birmingham so they can spend more time together. However, when Corinna is killed in a fire, her 10 year old son Peter is in a coma and her husband has disappeared and is now a murder suspect Robin’s determined to investigate this case and find out the truth, despite no longer being part of the police.

I really became invested in Robin, despite not being the easiest of characters to like at the beginning. She’s a hard woman with high emotional walls which are difficult to break down, but the more we learn about Robin and her background, the more we can begin to understand why she is emotionally cut off from everyone.

With a multitude of characters, Critical Incidents is a gripping page-turner with several storylines all cleverly weaved together and I am thrilled that I already have the next book in the series all lined up on my kindle read to read.

Rating: 5 out of 5.