Hope to Die by Cara Hunter (Bibliolifestyle Book Tour)

 Title:  Hope to Die

Author:  Cara Hunter

Narrated by:  Emma Cunniffe, Lee Ingleby, Roy McMillan

Publisher: HarperAudio

Length: Approximately 11 hours and 21 minutes

Source: Audiobook purchased from Amazon.com.  Thank you, Partner @bibliolifestyle @williammorrowbooks for the physical copy of the novel.

Do you have any favorite fictional detectives?  I love the classic detectives – Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Miss Marple, but I always love to find new and fascinating detectives to read about.

Detective Inspector (DI) Fawley and his team are called into a gruesome and puzzling murder scene in Oxford, England.  At a remote home, an elderly man has killed an intruder.  At first it seems like a burglary gone wrong, but as the team investigates further, they discover there is much more to the story.  I loved all the twists and turns, so I am not going to go any further with the summary.

My thoughts on the novel:

·       Hope to Die is the sixth novel in the DI Adam Fawley series.  This was the first book I’ve read in this series, and it worked well as a standalone novel.  I definitely want to go back and read the other books in the series.

·       There is a great list of characters at the start of the book with detailed descriptions of them.  This really helped when you are starting this series six books in.  I could see this helping to refresh one too even if you had read other novels in the series, but it has been a while.

·       This mystery was very twisty and turny.  I kept thinking I knew what was going on, but then the story would take another left turn.

·       There was a fun reference to Thomas Hardy books in this novel which was fun as I am currently reading Far From the Madding Crowd for my Back to the Classics Book Club.

·       Hope to Die was very well written and intriguing to listen to in an audiobook.   I always enjoy the use of different narrators for different viewpoints.

·       Hope to Die was written in a unique format.  Mixed media is used such as case files, interviews, letters, news stories, excerpts from a Netflix special, etc.  There are no chapters, but sections are broken up for readability.

·       The Acknowledgements section has interesting information about a real-life case that inspired this story.  The real-life story has a documentary on Prime Video discussing the case.  I just added it to my “to watch” list.

·       This is a very popular crime procedural series and I’m glad I’ve found it. 

Overall, Hope to Die by Cara Hunter was an intriguing suspense mystery with a complex case and great ending.  I highly recommend this novel.

This book was published on June 11, 2024.