The Favor

A Novel

By: Nicci French

Narrated by: Imogen Church

Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins

Publisher's summary

In this twisty new stand-alone novel from internationally bestselling author Nicci French, a young woman agrees to do a favor for her first love—but when things go horribly wrong, one small task turns into a murder investigation that completely upends her life, ensnaring her in a deadly web of secrets and lies.

It’s a simple enough favor.

Jude hasn’t seen Liam in years, but when he shows up at her work asking for a favor, she finds she can’t refuse. All Jude has to do is pick Liam up at a country train station—without telling anyone. So what if she has to lie to her fiancé? Jude is still committed to him and their imminent wedding, even if she and Liam were in love once.

She owes him.

After the car crash that changed everything years ago, bright, ambitious Jude went to medical school, back on the path she had planned before meeting moody, artistic Liam. Meanwhile, he never fully recovered from the dark stain the accident left on his record.

Now he’s gone.

When the police show up at the station instead of Liam, Jude realizes that she knows nothing about the man he’s become. Now she’s tangled up in his life, the last person to have seen him, and maybe the only one who can uncover the truth about what went wrong—even if she destroys her own life in the process.

©2022 Nicci French (P)2022 HarperCollins Publishers

Really?

I usually love Nikkis books but this main character Jude.. I wanted to jump thru the phone and shake her...soo dumb...if she said "I don't understand " one more time I was literally going to scream. such a dud..

Poor narrator

I love the Nicci French series’s but I found the narrator made all the characters sound like Valley girls. The up octave at the end of characters speech is very distracting. If I didn’t enjoy the story so much I wouldn’t finish this offering

This book may be even longer than it seems.

In all 27,000 pages (234 chapters), Jude does not make one good decision. If you meet her on the street, run like hell.

Not believable

I think most murder mystery/thrillers have elements that push the limits of believability but this was too much. We don’t even have to go much beyond how well, dumb, the main character was. The narrator is good but she does upspeak at the end of sentences a lot, which starts to grate.

Pretty good “read”

The story line held my interest but I didn’t love it. I thought the performance was excellent and, I’m sure, added a great deal to my enjoyment of the novel.

Not a sympathetic main character!

One bad choice after another, I was getting so frustrated with Jude’s decision making I wondered how she ever made it through medical school. Good story line, but I had a hard time connecting and feeling any empathy for Jude.

Wow.

This was torture. I love love love Imogen Church but I don’t think I’ll ever get involved in another Nicci French. This story was absolute chaos. Some of the conversations were stilted and redundant, they just sort repeated themselves throughout the book and sometimes even in the same paragraph. It was definitely not a thriller, but a family psychological drama. The characters were insane and bizarre. When I got close to the end I started wondering if Liam had just killed himself to escape the insanity. However, that is not what happened. To be honest, I don’t even really know what happened or who did what. There was so much chaos that didn’t resolve itself really at all. Imogen Church did everything she could to breathe life into this book but I think it was beyond saving.

Fantastic narration

The narrator really brought the entire array of eclectic characters to life for me in a way that would not have happened by just reading the hard copy book. Excellent job!

Good, not the best.

Interesting premise but a predictable ending. They didn't really have a well thought out intriguing ending so it was predictable, flat, even boring. Also, for much of the story this doctor didn't sound like a doctor at all. She didn't even mention she wasn't going to work which was very odd and seemed uncharacteristic. I expected more.

Not their best

I’ve enjoyed so many Nicci French books, but I couldn’t get past the main character in this one. What doctor would be this dumb? The ending was obvious about 2/3 of the way through, and the authors over explain every turn in the plot, while the protagonist repeats “I still don’t understand “ over and over.