Untitled Lucie Whitehouse 2: A nail-biting and unputdownable new crime thriller

What does it cost to live free?

On a warm May night, a woman is found dead at the wheel of her car on a Birmingham back street, a single knife wound to her throat.

To DCI Robin Lyons, called away from a date with her new lover, the clinical murder initially suggests organized crime, especially when she learns that Heather Pethick lived on a farm with access to secluded coves on the Cornish coastline. Was she a courier, delivering drugs or even people to a contact in the city?

The more Robin learns, though, the less likely that seems. Heather's distraught husband is adamant she'd never jeopardize the life the two of them had built with their six-year-old son, Mikey, especially as her own childhood had been precarious.

But then another woman goes missing - a woman with whom Heather had been seen in fraught conversation just hours before she died.

Uncovering the truth will take Robin down a rabbit hole into a world where nothing is what it seems and accountability is shrugged off as lightly as a summer jacket. She and her team will be forced to consider what it really means to live freely - and what that might cost other people. For one team member, it will cost their life.

• Publication date: 3 September 2026
• Page count: 384
• Dimensions: Height 163 mm; Width 243 mm; Thickness 35 mm
• Publisher: Orion Publishing Co
• Format: Hardback
• ISBN-13: 9781398709294