11 May 2023.
ISBN: 978-1-52941-917-7 (HB)
For Luke it was love at first sight. When he laid eyes on Rose, he knew she was the one: the woman he wanted to grow old with. Rose was more wary. She really didn’t want to fall in love, but she let her guard down and now they’re married, and she has surprised Luke by booking an idyllic late honeymoon on a Caribbean Island. But Rose has a secret, and it’s huge, and has the potential to destroy everything. The reason she sprang the surprise trip is that she has killed her former abusive partner and left his body in their apartment.
Luke is stunned, but desperate to make things right for Rose. He contacts Mickey, a friend from the past, who has made a profession of helping women escape from abusive relationships; he knows she won’t refuse to help Rose. He asks her to see to the apartment and retrieve something vital, while the two of them stay on the island until it’s safe. And that’s when it all starts to unravel.
Jo Spain knows how to build suspense. One way she does it here by releasing important information sparingly and in small nuggets. Another is by alternating viewpoints. Luke, Rose and Mickey each tell their own strand of the story, and each segment ends on a cliff-hanger – and of course it’s not only Rose who is harbouring secrets. The result is the kind of taut, pacy thriller that makes you unable to stop reading until you’ve found out exactly what’s going on. And you’ll never guess what that is.
But that’s not all. Spain weaves in some big themes, the biggest of them domestic violence and its repercussions. She offers a glimpse into the opaque world of finance, and the even more impenetrable domain of criminal gangs. But she doesn’t preach. She achieves all this and more through scratch-them-and-they’ll-bleed characters; not only the three main players but an equally well drawn supporting cast as well. My favourites include two contrasting policemen: thoughtful Marcel on the island, and bored country copper Stephen in Ireland; and Elliott, the gentle giant, who finds hidden depths when he embarks on a mission to uncover some of those secrets. Even he has an agenda; he works with Mickey because of life-changing domestic violence in his own family.
Spain also has a keen eye for location and knows how to paint a vivid picture in the reader’s mind. The idyllic Caribbean Island shows another face when a huge tropical storm erupts. The narrow lanes and sparsely populated village in Ireland simply breathe menace.
Jo Spain won her crime
writing spurs a few years ago through a television search for new talent. She
has fulfilled the promise that was spotted and then some. If you haven’t
discovered her yet, Don’t Look Back will make you want to look back – at
her eleven earlier novels.
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick
Jo Spain is vice-chair of business body InterTrade Ireland and a parliamentary assistant in Leinster House. Her first novel With our Blessing was published by Quercus, London and was one of seven books shortlisted in the Richard and Judy search for a bestseller competition 2014. The book is based on the investigations of a Dublin-based detective team led by Tom Reynolds. It was launched in Ireland in September 2015 and became a top-ten bestseller that month. The rights have been snapped up in Germany. Since the she has published ten further books. Jo lives in Dublin with her husband and their four young children.
Lynne Patrick has been a
writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short
stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She
crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years and is proud to
have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives in
Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.
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