The Last Voice You Hear
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4.2 • 132 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
By the New York Times bestselling author of Slow Horses
The hunter becomes the hunted in the thrilling follow-up to Down Cemetery Road, now an Apple Original series.
After narrowly escaping an attempt on her life, Oxford private investigator Zoë Boehm is determined to keep a low profile. So when Caroline Daniels takes a fatal fall in front of a train and her boyfriend fails to turn up at the funeral, Zoë turns down the case—despite the insistence of Caroline’s boss, who is convinced it was foul play. Then, a local teen boy plunges from the top of a London tower block and dies in disturbingly similar circumstances, and Zoë has no option but to follow the evidence.
With the help of her close friend Sarah Tucker, Zoë attempts to track down Caroline’s boyfriend, who seems to have vanished without a trace. As her search uncovers dangerous threads, including police corruption and a potential serial killer at work, she begins to suspect she’s being watched. Has the killer found her first—and if he has, will that make her the next victim?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This tight, literary, clich -free novel, the second in British author Herron's Zo Boehm series (after Down Cemetery Road) but the first to be published in the U.S., finds the Oxford private detective investigating three mysteries: a 12-year-old purse snatcher's plunge from the roof of a seedy London high-rise and the separate murders of two middle-aged women. Boehm suspects the women's deaths are linked to their dating Alan Talmadge, a Motown-humming Bluebeard who preys on women whose age is edging them out of the singles scene. Boehm believes Talmadge pushed the two women to their deaths, into a subway track and a ditch of water, respectively. Herron's writing includes some fine images: "when she coughed, it racked through her like she was a wardrobe full of empty coathangers." The hunter becomes the hunted as Boehm seeks refuge deep in the country, with a friend who keeps ostriches, of all things. This plot is intriguing from opening to denouement. Point-of-view switches could confuse some readers, and the capture of one perpetrator is postponed for a sequel, but this doesn't dim Herron's gift for action, dialogue and, most of all, psychology and setting.
Customer Reviews
The last voice you hear
Herron is an excellent writer and I mean by that he can construct sentences paragraphs and chapters that I know I could not. He is in that rare category with great crime novelist such as Martin Cruz Smith, James Lee Burke, Ian, Rankin, Daniel, Silva, and others for whom the written word is a complex mash up well thought out and constructed. Not his best, but far above some of the more pedestrian novels that make it to the best seller lists.
Binge read!
It’s 2:00 in the afternoon & I’m still in my pjs-could not stop reading!!
Not as good as Slough House novels, boring characters
No no no, too much female internal monologue and female drama in general… give me Jackson Lamb and other Slough House characters any day over Zoë Boehm and Sarah Tucker. I am a woman but prefer stronger characters who talk less and are funnier.