I love a good, fast-paced thriller and this book showed a lot of promise. In the opening few pages, the heroine — a woman known as “Jack” — returns home from a dangerous assignment (she does physical checks of security for companies, involving illegal break-ins) to find her husband murdered. And she quickly becomes the prime — indeed, only — suspect. And makes a run for it. With echoes of 1930s thrillers like John Buchan’s The Thirty Nine Steps she even has to jump from a moving train at one point. But there were three things I didn’t like about the book. First, the internal monologue, which is quite repetitive, focussing on how much she misses her dead husband. That significantly padded out the story and I though unnecessarily so. The second two gripes involve a SPOILER ALERT: if you’ve ever seen the movie Ghost with Demi Moore, you may remember her beloved murdered husband and his best friend, the slimy Carl Bruner. A character appears here and I immediately thought — please don’t go there. But the author did. But the worst part was to follow. In the end, as you can imagine, good triumphs (no spoiler there) and our heroine is recuperating in hospital. But with her beloved husband gone, she sees no point in living. After all, what can a woman alone do with her life? And then I worried that the author would slip in some handsome doctor and she’d fall into his arms. But no, this is 2023, authors don’t do that kind of nonsense any more. Instead, Jack finds meaning and a reason to live because, as we discover, she is … with child. The utterly backward and reactionary nature of the story was really quite a shock to me. As if a talented, educated, witty woman can only find meaning in life through her amazing husband or a child. I may be unfair, but those things ruined an otherwise interesting book for me.