Hope to Die

Product Information

The sixth twisty, up-all-night thriller from the Sunday Times bestselling Cara Hunter. For fans of Shari Lapena, Claire Douglas and Lisa Jewell.

Before long, it becomes clear that the Swanns changed their name by deed poll after a notorious court trial in which their daughter, Camilla aka 'the chameleon', was convicted of the murder of her baby on the basis of circumstantial evidence, no body was ever recovered. After 17 years, Camilla is still serving her life sentence at HMP Heathside. DNA evidence obtained from the victim proves that the dead man's mother is Camilla, clear evidence that she was not guilty of murdering her baby. As Adam and his hardworking team look into the past, at the previous police investigation and Camilla as a schoolgirl, her multiple pregnancies, her friends and family, and the present, who is the dead man and how did he come to make the fateful visit to the farmhouse to see the Swanns? There is surprise twist after twist in this dark and disturbing crime story. The DI Adam Fawley series just keeps getting better and better' Victoria Selman, Truly, Darkly, Deeply

Recent Posts

I load the last of the supper plates and straighten up. Alex is watching me from the other side of the kitchen. She looks a little apprehensive, though I don’t know why: she can’t really think I’d say no. So was it hard to veer away from Adam Fawley and his Oxford team to start on something completely new? This is quite hard for me to review as this is my first Cara Hunter book and at the time of joining the blog tour I wasn’t aware this was book six of a series 😫 and only realised this once I started reading it and put it on goodreads as currently reading so I do think that sadly took away some of the reading experience as I felt like I had missed out on things from previous books. Hunter’s imagining of what happened to Camilla’s baby results in a fast paced, intricate plot, filled with suspense and some great twists. It really is an intriguing case. Fawley finds himself interviewing Camilla in prison and she truly is just as slippery and unhelpful as reported in her original interviews. A brilliant read, recommended for all fans of crime fiction. 4.5★

There are so many things to love about this series. Hunter has once again crafted a story that is so fast paced, so full of twists and turns and so well researched that I honestly couldn’t have put the book down even if I wanted to. I really enjoy Hunter’s writing style and I find it absolutely fascinating the way she includes interview transcripts, newspaper clippings and TV scripts to bring the story to life. I was also really intrigued to learn that the story is inspired by a real life case in Australia which for me made the story even more compelling. Police receive a call of a shooting at a remote cottage one night. When the uniforms arrive there is a man lying dead on the kitchen floor with his face blown off by a shotgun blast, pretty gross I know. The homeowners, elderly couple Richard and Margaret Swann claim he broke in and Richard shot him in self defence. There is a knife in his hand and Richard has a nasty cut on his own hand.So it’s been fun and incredibly immersive. It’s like an Agatha Christie style murder-mystery set in the modern day,” Cara explains. Considering Cara was a copywriter writing books on the side a few years ago, her rise has been meteoric. PC Puttergill pulls on the handbrake and the two of them peer out of the window. It may have ‘Manor’ in its name but it’s actually just a farmhouse, though to be fair, a pretty hefty one – a gravel drive, a five-bar gate and an old mud-spattered SUV parked outside an open barn. It looks quiet, private and a little run-down, as a certain type of old-money home so often does. What it certainly doesn’t look like is a place where bad things happen.

I hope Oxford will be getting a new TV crime series,” she laughs, “which is really exciting but we will have to see. It would be the icing on an already huge birthday cake but it’s out of my hands. Cara Hunter in Oxford’s Anchor D I Fawley and his team head up the investigation, but it’s not going to be an easy one to solve. The victim has no ID on him whatsoever, not even a mobile phone, and the elderly couple who live there claim they don’t know him, insist it was a burglary, but investigators discover that not everything is as it seems.I am positive though because Fawley is already a great police ensemble piece, rather than one guy solving a crime, which TV audiences seem to like, and I grinned when I read the script. It’s brilliant.” Cara Hunter has hit this one out of the park and, if not for the format. I cannot wait to see what she comes up with next. Many thanks to Netgalley and Penguin General UK - Fig Tree, Hamish Hamilton, Viking, Penguin Life, Penguin Business for the much appreciated arc which I reviewed voluntarily and honestly. I was engrossed at the start of the book, I love a good murder and the whole trying to work out who had done it. Police procedurals are probably my favourite type of reads. Reports come in of the sound of gunshot at a remote farmhouse late at night. Police arrive at the scene, and even with their past experience, they find the sight of a dead man, shot in the head at very close range, pretty hard to stomach. The crime scene is horrific.