The Last Voice You Hear

by Mick Herron

Overview

Oxford private investigator Zoë Boehm struggles with the aftereffects of her violent past as she hunts for a killer—or has she become the hunted?

Zoë Boehm has harbored a distinct aversion to death ever since she shot the man intent on killing her. So when Caroline Daniels takes a deadly fall in front of a train and her lover fails to turn up at the funeral, Zoë wants nothing to do with the case. But Caroline’s boss is persistent, and as Zoë attempts to unlock the secrets of a woman she’s never met while in search of a man who could be anywhere, she starts to wonder if he’s found her first. And if he has, will that make her the next victim, or prove to be her salvation from a paralyzing fear?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781616955847
Publisher:	Soho Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	04/14/2015
Series:	The Oxford Series , #2
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	69,574
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Mick Herron is a British novelist and short story writer who was born in Newcastle and studied English at Oxford. He is the author of six books in the Slough House series (Slow Horses, Dead Lions, Real Tigers, Spook Street, London Rules, and the novella The List) and four Oxford mysteries (Down Cemetery Road, The Last Voice You Hear, Why We Die, and Smoke and Whispers), as well as the standalone novels Reconstruction, Nobody Walks and This Is What Happened. His work has won the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel, the Steel Dagger for Best Thriller, and the Ellery Queen Readers Award, and been nominated for the Macavity, Barry, Shamus, and Theakstons Novel of the Year Awards. He currently lives in Oxford and writes full-time.

Read an Excerpt

“She’s the one.”
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Last Voice You Hear"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Mick Herron.
Excerpted by permission of Soho Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Last Voice You Hear

“With its vivid descriptions . . . and unexpected clues . . . The Last Voice You Hear is stylish and engaging.”
—Washington Post

"Unexpected and satisfying . . . The engaging heroine never loses her cool, from the melancholy opening to the whirlwind finale, a marvelously extended set-piece."
—Kirkus Reviews

"[A] tight, literary, cliché-free novel."
—Publishers Weekly

“Thoroughly worth reading.”
—Booklist

Praise for Mick Herron

"Mick Herron never tells a suspense story in the expected way."
—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Good characterization, dialogue and well-paced narrative make this confident first novel frighteningly plausible.”
—Daily Telegraph

From the Publisher

With its vivid descriptions (the texture of Zoë's troubled sleep is compared to "hunting somebody through a viciously thorned maze") and unexpected clues, notably the Motown records of which the killer is fond, The Last Voice You Hear is stylish and engaging.
— The Washington Post

Dennis Drabelle

This tight, literary, clich -free novel, the second in British author Herron's Zoe Boehm series (after Down Cemetery Road) but the first to be published in the U.S., finds the Oxford private detective investigating three mysteries: a 12-year-old purse snatcher's plunge from the roof of a seedy London high-rise and the separate murders of two middle-aged women. Boehm suspects the women's deaths are linked to their dating Alan Talmadge, a Motown-humming Bluebeard who preys on women whose age is edging them out of the singles scene. Boehm believes Talmadge pushed the two women to their deaths, into a subway track and a ditch of water, respectively. Herron's writing includes some fine images: "when she coughed, it racked through her like she was a wardrobe full of empty coathangers." The hunter becomes the hunted as Boehm seeks refuge deep in the country, with a friend who keeps ostriches, of all things. This plot is intriguing from opening to denouement. Point-of-view switches could confuse some readers, and the capture of one perpetrator is postponed for a sequel, but this doesn't dim Herron's gift for action, dialogue and, most of all, psychology and setting. (Oct. 5) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

An Oxford private enquiry agent with a distinct aversion to death takes on a series of adversaries with no such scruples. Zoe Boehm came by her fear of death honestly by shooting a man determined to kill her (Down Cemetery Road, not reviewed). Ever since, she's done her best to avoid the dead in her professional practice, preferring commissions like returning 12-year-old runaway Dig, ne Andrew Kite, to his distraught family. Now death has found Zoe out, despite her best efforts. The week that acquitted bullion robber and cop killer Charles Parsley Sturrock finally gets his quietus, Zoe's shocked to learn that Wensley Deepman, the nasty little boy who took Dig under his wing three years ago, has died as well in a highly suspicious fall from a tower block. So Zoe's in no mood to trace Alan Talmadge, the new boyfriend of Caroline Daniels, who failed to show up for her funeral and hasn't been heard from since. But Caroline's boss, troubleshooter Amory Grayling, is so gently persistent and his late secretary so sadly appealing in her loneliness that Zoe can't say no. All too soon she's sorry she couldn't, as Herron draws the three creepy deaths together in unexpected and satisfying ways. The engaging heroine never loses her cool, from the melancholy opening to the whirlwind finale, a marvelously extended set-piece showing what happens when determined killers hunt for somebody equally determined to not be found.

Kirkus Reviews