‘The Last Time I Saw Him’ by Rachel Abbott

Published by Wildfire,
15 August 2024.
ISBN: 978-1-03540341-7  (PB)

During a well-earned weekend away with her mum, Stephanie King encounters Ellis Cobain, a wealthy entrepreneur, on holiday at the same hotel with his wife Celia. But Celia hardly puts in an appearance, and Cobain has dinner with another woman and her husband. To Stephanie’s sharp eyes, it’s plain that he and the woman know each other, and the woman wishes they didn’t.

A few days later, Steph finds herself back at the same hotel, but this time in her official capacity of detective sergeant. Her partner DCI Gus Brodie co-opts her into the murder investigation team when Ellis Cobain’s body is found on his luxury yacht, moored at sea just a few hundred yards from the hotel. Cobain’s wife is still there, and so are the couple Steph saw him with at the weekend, Juliette and Russell Dalton. Russell is a lawyer for a talent agency, and is there to discuss a contract with Nadia Shariq, a jazz singer who has a residency at the hotel.

No case is ever straightforward for Steph, Gus and the team, but this one proves even more complicated than most. What little evidence they find points towards one of the three women, nervy Celia, uptight Juliette and self-assured but vulnerable Nadia; each of them has history with Cobain and good reason to want him dead. But everything they do find is circumstantial, and there’s nothing to point definitively to one of the three. In addition, Ellis Cobain emerges as a thoroughly dislikeable character, which leads to a certain reluctance to pin his murder on anyone.

Rachel Abbott’s novels are always far more about the characters than the crime. The personalities of Celia, Juliette and Nadia, and of the people around them, are full and rich, and their lives could continue way beyond the story they inhabit. Steph and Gus, too, have a past and ongoing relationship which transcends this novel and the series it belongs in. Even the minor characters seem to exist both in- and outside the narrative.

The locations, too, spring off the page: the subtle, stylish hotel suites; the unspoiled and sometimes treacherous Cornish clifftop and coves; Cobain’s ostentatious luxury yacht.

It’s a novel in which the reader is always allowed to be a few steps ahead of the police, and it’s all the better for it; we’re kept wondering how it will be resolved, and how justice can best be served. There’s a shocking twist close to the end, and I was left aching to know what Rachel Abbott’s plans are for her protagonists. This is crime writing at its absolute best.
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Rachel Abbott was born just outside Manchester, England.   She became a systems analyst at the age of 21 in the early 1970s and formed her own software company in the mid-1980s designing computer programmes for education.   The company expanded into all forms of interactive media and became extremely successful. The sale of the company in 2000 enabled her to take early retirement and fulfil one of her lifelong ambitions - to buy and restore a property in Italy.  Once there she completely restored a ruined monastery and started a second successful business renting it out for weddings and conferences. In 2010 she embarked on her third career and wrote her first book Only the Innocent. She has now written fourteen books.

 www.rachel-abbott.com/ 

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.