Final Minute was the second thriller I read from Simon Kernick. Another winner with a great female detective, and a central character whose narrative continues to shift.
'Matt' wakes up after a car crash, finding he has been nursed physically and mentally, far out in the Welsh countryside by his sister and a psychologist for the last two months. All is not what it seems and Matt begins to doubt who Dr. Branson and his sister really are. He soon realizes he is a prisoner and begins to hide his sedating medication. After a daring escape to London, he turns to ex-Met cop turned private detective Tina Boyd for answers. When she opens the door to him, she says "Hi Sean!".
He then finds out he is actually an ex-cop who was convicted of rape and sent to jail alongside the criminals he had help put away. He begins to have black nightmares about dead bodies - where are the bodies? Was he really responsible for his convicted crimes?
Tina Boyd is a great detective character, a female Jack Reacher who isn't bound by the law, ready to bend the rules, or ignore them completely. She once dated Mike Bolt from the last Kernick novel I read Stay Alive; Mike also makes an appearance but is a dolt compared with Tina. She is on the case of a missing girl she suspects is one from Sean's dreams. The two threads are tied together in a British prostitution ring with connections from Russian gangsters right on up to the Home Secretary. Sean may have been let out of jail early to expose the ring - or work for them - or was he just trying to save his wife and daughter?
This is the seventh Tina Boyd thriller from Kernick and I would go back and read the others. I like it when an author weaves the characters in from other books. Besides character, the writing was also good which isn't always the case. A complex and surprising thriller, good all the way to the end.
2015 / Tradeback / 407 pages
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