Thank you Netgalley for the ARC of this book. What a ride!! This was another excellent installment in the ongoing series. The story was suspenseful and kept me flipping pages all night. Cara Hunter is one of my auto buy authors. The twists and turns in this book really kept me on my toes.
Highly recommend

Cara Hunter has proven to be a master at writing heart-pounding thrillers, and every book in the DI Fawley series is unputdownable. The latest installment, "Hope to Die," is the sixth book in the series and kept me on the edge of my seat from beginning to end. The storyline was well-planned out with expertly placed twists and turns. If you haven't read the prior installments, don't worry, as Cara Hunter provides a little cheat sheet on the recurring characters in the beginning, so you can jump into this series right here if you want. "Hope to Die" is a five-star thriller that I can honestly say I didn't figure out anything until it was revealed, and I love that! I am looking forward to the next book in this must-read series!

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance copy.

Hope to Die is the 6th book in the Adam Fawley series, and it’s perfect for fans of procedurals. I’ve been in a reading slump, and this one helped me get out of it. The story centers on the shooting of an unknown victim, possibly breaking into an elderly couple’s home. The investigation spirals outward from there. I think this is my favorite Fawley book yet.

I can’t praise Cara Hunter’s sixth DI Adam Fawley crime novel enough. Hope to Die is everything a police procedural should be, with a solid team of police officers, a thoughtful lead, and a complex case that contains twists even up until the last chapter. The bestselling series is a smash in England, and the production rights have been purchased for TV. Fans of Ann Cleeves’ Vera series should hope this series makes it to BBC, BritBox or Acorn.

If a man hadn’t reported the gunshot at Gantry Manor outside Oxford, a young man’s death might never have been discovered. When the local police find the man’s body with his face shot away, and no identification, the elderly Swanns tell a strange story of a burglary gone wrong. But, the details just don’t add up for DI Fawley and his team. Why did the Swanns never call the police? How did Richard Swann get the shotgun from the cellar in time to shoot the victim? There were so many inconsistencies.

Then Fawley and team members recognize the Swanns, and link them to a notorious case that made headlines all over the country fifteen years earlier, and inspired a Netflix series. When Camilla Rowan was seventeen, she gave birth to a baby boy, and walked out of the hospital with him two hours later. The baby was never seen again, but five years afterwards, a social worker asked questions. What happened to that baby? Five years after his disappearance, Camilla, “Milly Liar”, was tried and convicted of killing her child. She’s now been in prison for fifteen years. She continues to protest her innocence, saying she gave the baby to its father, but the previous nationwide search turned up nothing. Now, Fawley and his team have to dig into the past again to investigate that disappearance, wondering how it connects to the death at Gantry Manor.

As I said, Hope to Die is a well-written, complex police procedural with the investigation laid out carefully. There are a few spoilers for the previous book in the series, The Whole Truth, but if you start at the beginning of the series, that might not matter. Hunter provides an added feature, a summary of the police officers in the book, with their character traits, marriage status, and status on the team. It’s so helpful! This is one of my favorite books of the year so far.

Hope to Die is inspired by a true case in Australia. Hunter’s use of mixed media, including TV scripts, DNA summaries, and texts between police departments makes the police procedural relevant today.

I have read several of these Cara Hunter police procedural novels. The characters are quite familiar to me, as they will be to any reader who has been following Hunter's novels. Hope to Die is the 6th novel in the DI Adam Fawley series. Each novel provides multiple point of view narration, which makes it easier to follow the police investigation. Online blogs, newspaper articles, and investigative notes offer readers a more complex, multi-level narration. In many way, Hunter's novels tend to feel more authentic as a police investigation, where each fact seems to lead in multiple directions. Nothing is straight forward. I do hope these books will be turned into a TV series.

Hope to Die begins with what seems to be a home invasion shooting, but soon enough the investigation focuses on the victim's identification, as well as the personal history of the homeowners. The characters in the police force are individuals, with personalities that readers can easily see being so diverse and divisive that they are every bit as interesting as the victim and criminals whom readers meet.

Thank you to Hunter, publisher Willian Morrow, and NetGalley for providing me with this ARC. My comments are my own view of this novel's strengths. I enjoyed Hope to Die, and look forward to book 7 in this series.