📖 Featured Book of the Month ~ Exit by Belinda Bauer

Bantam Press
21 January 2021

My thanks to the publisher for my copy of this book

IT WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO BE MURDER . . .

Pensioner Felix Pink is about to find out that it’s never too late . . . for life to go horribly wrong.

When Felix lets himself in to Number 3 Black Lane, he’s there to perform an act of charity: to keep a dying man company as he takes his final breath . . .

But just fifteen minutes later Felix is on the run from the police – after making the biggest mistake of his life.

Now his world is turned upside down as he must find out if he's really to blame, or if something much more sinister is at play. All while staying one shaky step ahead of the law.

📖 My thoughts..

Septuagenarian Felix Pink is just your average pensioner wearing a beige jacket who sits compassionately waiting whilst some very sick people take their dying breaths. He's not by their side to help their demise in any way but when the sad affair is over, Felix calmly packs away the detritus of his presence and steals away never to be seen again, that is, until one day when it all goes horribly wrong.  

It's been a while since I read a crime thriller which made me laugh out loud but from the moment I met Felix I knew that he was going to fully occupy my thoughts for the time it took to read this excellent story. Felix is just so inoffensively ordinary that you can't help but love him and that's where the absolute strength of this story lies in that everyone is just so ordinary, and yet the author brings out all the subtle nuances of their quirky personalities with a delicious sense of mischief,  and a real talent for making the ordinary become absolutely extraordinary.

Belinda Bauer shows that it is perfectly possible to juggle both humour and tragedy and still write a daring crime story. There's a lightness of touch throughout which allows the really dark moments in Exit to have the desired impact whilst at the same time softening the blow with something deliciously daft which makes you laugh out loud. I thought I knew where the story was heading but I really didn't and I loved it all the more because I didn't see what was coming.

Reading Exit over the past few days has been a real delight which is why I have no hesitation in making it my Featured Book of the Month for February.

Exit was published on the 21st January and is available now in ebook and hardback from all good book retailers.

About the Author

Belinda Bauer grew up in England and South Africa and now lives in Wales. She worked as a journalist and a screenwriter before finally writing a book to appease her nagging mother. With her debut, Blacklands, Belinda was awarded the CWA Gold Dagger for Crime Novel of the Year. She went on to win the CWA Dagger in the Library for her body of work in 2013. Her fourth novel Rubbernecker was voted 2014 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. In 2018 her eighth novel, Snap, was longlisted for the Man Booker prize. Her books have been translated into 21 languages.

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