The Favor

by Nicci French

At the end of a busy night shift, as Dr. Jude Winter is leaving the London hospital where she works, she encounters someone from her past: Liam Birch, her boyfriend from eleven years ago, when they were teenagers. They go for coffee, and he asks her for a favor.

Jude’s life has turned out pretty much the way she always wanted. She was a brilliant student, and now she’s a doctor. She and her boyfriend, Nat, are planning their upcoming wedding.

Liam says he can’t tell her yet what the favor is that he’s asking for. Or rather, the first part of the favor is that she’ll drive his car to Norfolk, to a house he’s rented there for a weekend. He’ll follow later by train, and she’ll pick him up at the station. When they’re at the house, he’ll tell her the rest of the favor. He says it’s nothing “wrong.”

Though she’s in love with Nat, she’s never forgotten Liam. She was crazy in love with him the summer they were leaving school, but their more-or-less secret love affair ended when they were in a bad car accident which ended with him being charged. She’s always felt guilty that her life carried on from success to success, while his went the other direction. So when he asks her this favor, she feels she owes it to him to agree.

But she doesn’t think she can explain it to Nat, so she lies to him, telling him she’s going to visit her grandmother.

She drives Liam’s car to Norfolk. She meets the train Liam is supposed to be on. But he’s not there. Then she’s contacted by police: Liam has been murdered, back in London.

That’s just the beginning of an absorbing and tension-filled story, with the complexity of relationships and motives — and a few twists — that Nicci French’s readers have come to expect. I literally couldn’t stop reading this one until I had finished.

Nicci French is actually a husband-and-wife writing team: Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. Together they’ve written twenty-four psychological thrillers, including a hugely popular eight-volume series featuring London psychotherapist Frieda Klein, and sixteen standalone novels. The Favor, published in 2022, is their most recent standalone.

Nicci’s early career included working with emotionally disturbed children and teaching at university before moving into magazine publishing. Her first marriage ended in divorce in 1989, leaving her with two young children. She and Sean met at the New Statesman magazine, where she was an editor and he had a monthly column.  They married in 1990, and together had two daughters in the early 1990s. Meanwhile both launched writing careers, separately publishing both fiction and non-fiction books.

In 1995 they began work on their first joint novel, combining their names to create the pseudonym of Nicci French. That novel, The Memory Game, was published in 1997 to considerable acclaim, launching their tandem writing career.

Nicci and Sean now live and write in Suffolk, near the east coast of England, though their urban roots stay with them: London neighborhoods and geography feature prominently in many of their novels.

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