Critical Incidents

Critical Incidents
Lucie Whitehouse

Who can you trust when your world goes up in flames?A gripping, sensational new crime drama, from the bestselling author of Before We Met.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.

Copyright (#ulink_8ef2aab0-ab6f-5f7c-a359-ae81dec7beb2)

4th Estate

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019

Copyright © Lucie Whitehouse 2019

Lucie Whitehouse asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover photography Face: © Plainpicture / Cristopher Civitillo; Match: Shutterstocl

Epigraph taken from The Less Deceived by Philip Larkin, by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008268992

Ebook Edition © February 2018 ISBN: 9780008269012

Version: 2019-01-09

Dedication (#ulink_4a531a4f-27ae-501f-a23e-e84cb77670bb)

For Bridget

Epigraph (#ulink_488efd4e-3613-584d-a5e6-7e5080ba1f84)

I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign

That this was still the town that had been ‘mine’

So long, but found I wasn’t even clear

Which side was which.

Philip Larkin

Contents

Cover (#u2ce8aed6-fa60-587c-b94e-2465913cbe45)

Title Page (#u5dc752e5-bedd-59c7-9239-45647eec8b93)

Copyright (#u540cf630-00db-55df-bc29-196a2f5bb0e2)

Dedication (#u11564133-c7bb-5a81-a03c-bf71c70119dd)

Epigraph (#u96a0db17-12c3-5fda-8aaa-2bd4789ecda3)

Chapter One (#u3a561b9d-4a21-5a26-a05f-6941ccceae84)

Chapter Two (#ubd8ffcf2-1cf4-5d65-a7f9-28e56ef9775b)

Chapter Three (#u2e7c0835-bccb-5cc0-8a26-bff3ff00ee84)

Chapter Four (#u8aca99c2-0891-5669-ba02-d808aada4732)

Chapter Five (#ud903b65e-7ff1-5ae2-b97a-3d73d1031cff)

Chapter Six (#u7efbae53-9d56-58fa-b2d1-63b38ac3a855)

Chapter Seven (#ua8802cca-6fd1-5f66-860b-99949527e82c)

Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)