“The day we left. Before I collected you from work. I killed somebody… There’s a dead body in our apartment.”

Don’t Look Back is the sixth stand-alone novel by Irish author, Jo Spain. Towards the end of a surprise week on a Caribbean Island with his wife of just three months, Luke Miller discovers the reason for her reluctance to return to London. What do you do when your wife has accidentally killed a man and his body is lying in your apartment in a different country?

Luke loves Rose Gillespie and will do anything to keep her safe. Truly, anything at all. If that means abandoning his life and going into hiding with Rose, that’s what he will do. So he contacts the one person he knows he can trust, Mickey Shiels. Their history means that she has every right to refuse to help. But Rose was once an abused wife, and that’s Mickey’s speciality.

Much more can’t be revealed without spoilers. Suffice it to say that each time the reader feels they have a handle on things, Spain throws in another wrinkle, another twist, another surprise that will keep the reader fully engaged all the way to the last page.

The narratives from multiple perspectives fill in the events that lead to this intriguing situation, and its aftermath. Spain’s characters are interesting and mostly appealing for all their very human flaws. Their dialogue and actions are credible, not requiring much suspension of disbelief. It doesn’t hurt that parts of this tightly plotted tale are blackly funny. Set aside a day: once you start this, you won’t want to put it down. Gripping crime fiction.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Quercus.