‘The Last Days of Kira Mullan’ by Nicci French

Published by Simon & Schuster,
16 January 2025.
ISBN: 978-1-3985-2413-2 (HB)

What do you do if you suspect someone has been murdered but everyone around you, even the police, assumes it was suicide? That’s the situation Nancy finds herself in when Kira, the young woman in the flat downstairs, is discovered hanging from a beam.

For Nancy it’s worse than simply not being believed. She’s recovering from a breakdown caused by overwork, and everything she says is put down to a relapse. Nobody takes her seriously, even – or especially – her solicitous partner Felix and their over-maternal neighbour Michelle. Nancy is convinced she is right and sets out to prove it. Her methods get her into trouble; Felix, Michelle and another neighbour, junior doctor Harry, call in a psychiatrist, and she is hauled off to the worst kind of mental health facility.

Meanwhile Maud, a sharp-eyed detective inspector has taken an interest in the case and starts to look more closely at the evidence.  By the time Nancy is finally released from the facility Maud has serious doubts about the original verdict, and Nancy’s reasons for her unshaken belief give her more food for thought. She has a battle to fight to convince her senior officer that the case merits further investigation, but Maud is made of stern stuff and wins out.

Like all Nicci French’s novels, this one is primarily about the people affected by the crime – for there’s little doubt there has been a crime. Nancy remains at the centre throughout, determined against the odds to prove that her breakdown was a temporary lapse, and hasn’t affected her judgement. Felix is ubiquitously at her shoulder, apparently caring and protective but with a well-hidden darker side. Michelle’s nosiness is thinly disguised as neighbourly concern. The various neighbours, friends, medical professionals and police all have distinct personalities, and so does the community they all inhabit. Even more vividly portrayed is the mental health facility, where Nancy’s struggles against even worse odds are the stuff of nightmares.

There’s a strong whodunnit thread, with several potential killers, but mainly the novel is about Nancy’s fight to be believed, and to believe in herself again. On another level it’s about relationships, their complexities and duplicities, what we show to others and what we hide. It’s more than crime novel – but so are all the best crime novels. 
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Nicci French is a pseudonym used by Sean French and Nicci Gerrard, two London journalists who conceive and write together psychological thrillers.

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.