The Favour: The gripping new thriller from an author 'at the top of British psychological suspense writing' (Observer)

Product Information

The Favour is about a doctor, Jude, who gets an unexpected, out of the blue visit from an old flame, Liam.

The Favour by Nicci French | Waterstones

Jude is in a mess, the wedding is off and she doesn't seem to be able to leave well alone getting involved with Liam's commune of friends, hippies? In some ways it’s almost impossible to believe Jude agrees to do a favour – without knowing ANYTHING about the request – for ex high school boyfriend Liam. The ending is quite good and makes up for the fact that both Jude and the plot meander around for far too long. When Liam is murdered, Jude finds herself in a tangled web that seems to pull more tightly around her at every turn. Yet, before she can resolve the present crisis, she has to take a painful journey back into her own past.

Jude’s intention to go home to Nat and say nothing is scuppered when someone leaks her role in this strange crime to the press. Future readers, if you are okay with preposterous and illogical plots then you'll have a better time than I did. Jude hasn’t seen Liam in years, but when he shows up at her work asking for a favor, she finds she can’t refuse. And just when everything seems to have been revealed, there’s a chilling, jaw-dropping twist in the final pages. They are a colourful and unconventional bunch but perhaps not quite as unconventional as they believe themselves to be.

The Favor by Nicci French | Goodreads

I still liked her but groaned each time she entrenched herself more deeply into the world her former high school boyfriend and his very unorthodox group of friends lived. The Memory Game was published to great acclaim in 1997 followed by The Safe House (1998), Killing Me Softly (1999), Beneath the Skin (2000), The Red Room (2001), Land of the Living (2002), Secret Smile (2003), Catch Me When I Fall (2005), Losing You (2006) and Until It's Over (2008). Then, out of the blue, after an absence of eleven years, her first serious boyfriend, Liam Birch turns up to meet her with a strange request. Then she enters Liam's adult world, his weird ass house that reminds me of a circus, with unsavoury, sexually aggressive, lost people, and develops her first singular opinion.I enjoyed the writing and The Favor started out with a bang - literally a car crash involving four teens and with the driver Liam under the influence suffering much of the blame and affecting the course of his life. Imagine her surprise when she see's that it's Liam, her boyfriend for a summer when she was 18 years old, the one she has thought of often throughout the years wondering what happened to him.

The Favour by Nicci French | Goodreads The Favour by Nicci French | Goodreads

It’s also clear pretty quickly that Jude has been used poorly by Liam so why she has a burning desire to comply with his legal instructions, particularly when her kindly, supportive family is encouraging her not to, is puzzling. The author does an amazing job at simplifying the descriptions, not over indulgent, but perfect as you can be there in the moment. So whilst I have mixed feelings about THE FAVOUR, feeling that it lacked something for me, I also know that I will be lining up to read French’s next novel as soon as it comes out. The life lesson Jude had to learn was heartbreaking, but at some point in our lives, we all have hard lessons to learn. In 1981 he won Vogue magazine's Writing Talent Contest, and from 1981 to 1986 he was their theatre critic.Medicine is a science, it’s about trouble shooting and problem solving, and it involves logical thought processes. We get some insight into how smitten she was 11 years earlier but even she admits he was kinda dangerous and unpredictable. I did hope for more of a shock at the end of the book as I did manage to piece together who the killer was at just over halfway through.