Cara Hunter: The Whole Truth, 9780241985144, April 29, 2021, Penguin, paperback

Cara Hunter can count me as one of her fans by now; this is her fifth book in the series set around the Oxford police team headed by inspector Alex Fawley which gets better with every book.  It happens rarely that I am left so completely in the dark about whodunit and Cara Hunter manages it perfectly. 

Hunter’s mysteries usually have two crimes going, the prose of the plot is interwoven and spiced up with emails, twitter snippets, WhatsApp messages and police investigation reports.  In “The Whole Truth” , out in paperback April 2021, Fawley’s team is called in to look at an unusual accusation: a male student for a change, Caleb Morgan, accuses his female professor Marina Fisher, a leading expert on Artificial Intelligence and rising star of his college, of assaulting him sexually while babysitting her son.  The second crime is a murder which derails the Fawley team completely; I will not reveal more as it would ruin the nail biting part of the novel.  

If you are in the mood for a very clever British crime novel set in Oxford with plenty of twist and turns that will keep you guessing how on the earth the author is going to  resolve this one, ”The Whole Truth” is a very good pick. Hats off to Cara Hunter for creating such a terrific, tense crime story.  A tiny piece of critique: I like my crime novel endings very tidy and this one felt a bit too lose for my taste but perhaps just right for others.