Intermission

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JUN 21, 2021

Hurley's underwhelming fifth crime thriller featuring London actor Enora Andressen (after 2020's Limelight) opens in March 2020 just as Britain goes into lockdown. The public health emergency doesn't prevent Enora from being persuaded by her cocaine-dealing friend, Hayden Prentice, to travel to Portsmouth, where a mutual friend needs consoling because her retired corrupt-cop husband, Dave Munroe, who was a key player in the city's coke rackets and helped keep Prentice out of the law's clutches, is seriously ill with the coronavirus. Munroe succumbs to Covid-19, and after Prentice ends up sick as well, Enora and her grown son, Malo, must get creative to fund his care because Prentice chooses not to use the National Health Service. The two also have to deal with a threat to Prentice's life from an unknown adversary whose efforts jeopardize Malo's life as well. Readers should be prepared for thinly drawn characters and a plot that takes too long to get going. Only those already invested in Enora, who doesn't come across as remotely troubled by drug addicts and other victims of her cocaine-dealer friend, are likely to find this appealing.