Claim Your Dead

Lucie Whitehouse

HOW did a farmer’s wife from the wilds of Cornwall end up with her throat cut in the driver’s seat of a car in a shady back street of Birmingham?

If you haven’t already enjoyed the police procedural perfection of Lucie Whitehouse’s top class Robin Lyons series then diving into our fourth murder mystery alongside the smart and sassy detective chief inspector – whose incisive police work has won her creator an army of fans – would be the ideal launch pad.

Whitehouse (pictured below), who grew up in Warwickshire and studied Classics at Oxford, now writes full time from America at her home in Brooklyn, delivers crime fiction with a superior edge… dynamic, superbly plotted stories packed with tension, mind-boggling twists, and large helpings of genuine humanity.

The backdrop to these all-encompassing thrillers is Birmingham, a diverse city where solving crime rests in the hands of a homicide team led by DCI Robin Lyons, a woman who juggles her high-profile job with the domestic ups and downs of being single parent to a sixteen-year-old daughter Lennie, and a relationship with a fellow police officer she is duty bound to keep secret.

In Claim Your Dead, we find Robin and her homicide team struggling to understand how 31-year-old farmer’s wife Heather Pethick, from a remote corner of Cornwall, was found dead in a vast pool of blood at the wheel of a car in a Birmingham side street after husband Greg had dropped her off at the train station in Truro the day before to visit a sick friend in London.

The circumstances of Heather’s death are a puzzle but the single knife slash to her throat leaves the police little room for doubt that she was murdered. And Robin initially suspects that the cold-blooded killing has all the hallmarks of organised crime, especially when she learns that Heather’s farm has close access to secluded coves on the Cornish coastline… ideal for trafficking.

But when another woman goes missing – a woman who was captured on CCTV having a heated row with Heather just hours before she died – Robin realises that there is far more to this story than she had first imagined. As the team delves into Heather’s past, can Robin find the killer before they strike again… and how much will she have to sacrifice to get to the truth?

In true crime mystery form, Robin is backed up by a formidable bunch of detectives and support staff in a case that is as baffling as it is shocking. The ruthless killing of Heather Pethick seems unfathomable to the experienced city police officers until a trickle of new evidence opens up unexpected lines of enquiry and a hidden history. 

But Whitehouse is never content to simply deliver a flawlessly plotted, edge-of-the-seat thriller… each story comes laced with brilliant character studies, the intricate workings of a well-drilled team, and the personal and professional conflicts which must inevitably arise for a police chief who combines motherhood with murder detection.

Prepare for powerful emotions, a gripping journey through a compulsively complex investigation, and a gut-punch finale that will leave you gasping, as Claim Your Dead joins Whitehouse’s growing pantheon of classy crime novels!
(Orion, hardback, £22)